Special characters & symbols in HTML
We've found that complete tables with HTML codes for all of the special characters and
symbols are very rare. So we've stopped searching for them, and created them ourselves.
If you are a web designer, you should bookmark at least one of the following three pages.
These pages contain all the codes you will ever need for inserting special characters and
symbols in your HTML pages.
On the first page, the characters and symbols are
sorted alphabetically by their number code, so you can see that
for your computer, the 'alphabet' starts with the space, followed by
the exclamation mark, and so on. Click here
to go straight to that table.
On the second page, all of these 217 characters and symbols are placed
in different categories. These categories make it easier for you
when you're looking for a specific character or symbol.
Click here to go to that page.
As these HTML codes for characters and symbols are based on the
first 128 characters of the Unicode character set, known as the
ISO Latin-1 character set, you'll have to define this
character set in the <HEAD> section of your HTML document to
override browsers with other character sets as their default
settings. To do this, include the following Meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
The first 96 characters and symbols, numbers
32-127, are the ones found on the standard English/American
keyboard. The codes with numbers 128 and higher have a name code assigned to them, as well as
a number code. Other keyboards contain other characters and symbols,
but no matter what 'Western' keyboard you might have, when you can find the
character on your keyboard, you don't need to use the
HTML code for that character or symbol, as long as you include the above
mentioned Meta tag in your document.
Exceptions to this rule are the &, ", < and > symbols. When
interpreting your HTML code, your browser might be confused when
you typed in these symbols directly.
Using the ", < and > symbols within your HTML, might
seriously confuse your browser while it's interpreting your code, because these
characters are used for constructing your HTML tags and their attributes. And the
& symbol might make your browser think that you want to
display a special character as included in these tables.
It depends on the characters that follow, whether it will confuse
your browser or not. You're usually fine when a space follows the symbol,
but use the code instead, just to be on the safe side.
Also notice the difference between numbers 32 and 160, the regular space and the non-breaking
space. The non-breaking space ( ) is probably the character code that's used the most in web
pages. You can use it for indenting and spacing, to adjust your web site's layout, but also to give a
background color to an empty table cell. This is necessary for your Netscape viewers, because for them a regular space
is not enough. When there's just a regular space (or nothing at all) in your table cell, it has no background
color and is displayed transparent.
Your common browser supports the first two sets of 128 characters and symbols.
The first set of 128 is equivalent to the commonly used 7-bit ASCII character set.
Its first 32 codes can't be used for your HTML pages, because they are either (currently) unused, or have no
visual representation on the screen, except maybe 	 (horizontal tab) and (line feed).
The remaining 96 represent all the characters
that can be found on the standard English/American keyboard.
The second set supports the special characters used in most Western languages, like German,
Spanish, French and the Scandinavian languages. Of this second set of 128 characters,
the first 32 (numbers 128-159) have no alternative names for their number code, while the next 96
(numbers 160-255) do provide you with alternative names to make it easier to remember them.
When you want to use more mathematical symbols, the Greek alphabet, or more characters
from various (Eastern) European languages, there are another two sets of 128 characters available.
Unfortunately, these codes only work in the modern versions of Internet Explorer (4+) and Netscape (6+).
older versions and smaller browsers like Opera do not support them. Also, some
font sets (like Courier) don't support some of these rare symbols. But
if you craft your pages in a richer font set (like Arial), and you don't need these symbols
displayed to every random visitor, they can be valuable assets to your pages.
You can find the extra characters and their HTML codes on this page.
The first of the two 'unsupported' sets of 128 characters and symbols provides support for
characters from various (mostly Eastern) European languages (numbers 256-383). The second set provides the
alternative name codes that weren't available previously, for the characters mentioned above (numbers 128-159).
In addition to that, many more mathematical symbols are available, along with the complete Greek alphabet.
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