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Special Characters

Have you ever wondered how to get that special character or symbol to display in your web page?

This section contains lists of common special entity codes needed in HTML to generate special characters such as the elusive ñ with the tilde or the British pound symbol £

Example; for the n with the tilde you would insert into your HTML ñ or ñ For the British pound you would insert £ or £

Declare Unicode Encoding

The codes listed on the following pages are valid for Unicode HTML pages only, and may not work in older browsers. IE is still behind and does not recognize all the special character codes, so be sure to check your pages for proper display. To make your page a Unicode page, add the following meta tag to the <head> portion of your document.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

For XHTML pages be sure you add the closing slash at the end of the meta tag.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly.

Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes

Notes regarding the use of these codes
  • Standards compliant browsers should display most, if not all of the listed special character entities.
  • Some older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 will not display if you use the entity code, use the numeric code.
  • Wysiwyg editors have a tendency to display what you type. Be sure to check the actual HTML code to insure it is coded properly.