Special Characters

For this character list, the open tag is & (ampersand) and the end tag is ; (semicolon). The code inbetween is the letter(s) to be typed followed by an abbreviation for the kind of diacritical mark to be overstruck (acute, grave, circumflex, cedilla, tilde, umlaut, ring, slash, ligature). As you might guess, the letter to be typed is case sensitive! Compare entries in the top row of this table with those in the bottom row. If you widen your window, you should be able to see the whole table (or use the scroll bar).

Á = Á À = À Â = Â Ã = Ã Å = Å Ä = Ä	É = É È = È Ê = Ê Ë = Ë	Í = Í Ì = Ì Î = Î Ï = Ï	Ó = Ó Ò = Ò Ô = Ô Õ = Õ Ö = Ö Ø = Ø	Ú = Ú Ù = Ù Û = Û Ü = Ü	Æ = Æ Ç = Ç Ñ = Ñ ß = ß
á = á à = à â = â ã = ã å = å ä = ä	é = é è = è ê = ê ë = ë	í = í ì = ì î = î ï = ï	ó = ó ò = ò ô = ô õ = õ ö = ö ø = ø	ú = ú ù = ù û = û ü = ü	æ = æ ç = ç ñ = ñ &;yuml; = ÿ

There are other characters you might want to display on screen that are not available from the keyboard. These are in the upper end of the decimal codes, so you code those with a numerical sequence. The syntax again is an open (ampersand) symbol and a close (semicolon) symbol with the # (number sign) and numerical value in between. This unfortunately is not too mnemonic...sorry!

Two exceptions are &reg which renders ® and &copy which renders ©. Well two mnemonic ones are better than none. Being a scientist, these are the wrong two for me, but "Them's the breaks!"

Also worthy of note is that what is rendered may be different than what you might expect...the browser software can be set to assign a particular default font, and decimal codes call up whatever the font's designer has put under that code. Ouch!

Sometimes you want to show characters on screen that would normally cause HTML actions to be taken. For example, the open and close symbols for HTML tags are < and >. To get these two characters to display on the screen you can simply type the sequence &lt or &gt. Thus the paragraph tag, <p>, can be typed into your HTML page this way: &ltp&gt. This way it displays instead of putting in a paragraph space! Here is a summary of those codes and what they display:

Finally, there is one other useful code, &nbsp, that creates a non-breaking space. This code, inserted into a blank cell in a table causes the cell to appear empty rather than filled (see below). It can also be inserted repeatedly between words to create multiple spaces (browsers otherwise ignore multiple   spaces in normal text). Finally, it can be used to force white space (force the browser to honor sequential <p> or <br> commands that are usually ignored). I used this trick to get the text in the cells of the first table of this page to be top-aligned rather than being vertically centered (you can view the source code to see how I did it).