17th May 2008

Displaying special characters in HTML

When you are creating HTML documents some characters may have to be coded in a different way.

For example if you wanted to include the character " < " on a page without it being interpreted as part of the HTML coding you could use < where lt means Less Than.

Equally to include the character " > " you could use > where gt means Greater Than.

These characters can also be represented by using their ISO 8859-1 equivalent as described below.

Using ISO 8859-1 codes to represent any special characters is fairly straight forward, it's achieved by placing the # character in the code followed by the corresponding ISO-8859-1 Number.

for example, to represent the character ® you could use ® where 174 is the ISO 8859-1 code for the symbol to be represented.

Another example would be the % character, this would be coded as % and the / character would be coded as / .

Below is a list of common characters and their equivalent :

" $ " - $

" * " - *

" + " - +

" - " - -

" = " - =

" / " - /

" ® " - ®

" @ " - @

for a complete list of the ISO 8859-1 codes click here.