HTML Entities – the next level
Ever since I started creating webpages I came across several issues regarding Portuguese special characters. For those who are unaware, Portuguese uses lots of á à é í ó õ ã â ê and so on.
Initially the only way of solving this problem was with a bit of prayer and the correct character encoding. However, when MySQL – or any other DBs – came into the picture, things went very wrong very fast. Now, besides character encoding on the HTML document, and hoping everything would work out server side, you also had to check DB encoding, table encoding and text field encoding…
Then Dreamweaver came along and brought something I had already knew but never used because it was a pain to always be looking for the code to all those characters within words in lots of sentences and even bigger texts. And Dreamweaver made it possible for us to write as we want and it automatically converts all those pesky characters to something like Á (which equals Á) just as long you had your HTML page set to ISO-8859-1 character encoding.
As time went by the use of UTF-8 as character encoding became almost a must have in web development (something for another article) and Dreamweaver, although a very good overall tool – not always beloved by developers – led to most of us to “learn” to write with special characters in mind. Nowadays I am so used to write directly with HTML Entities in mind that I rarely use any kind of tool other that a simple text editor (I use TextMate or NetBeans most of the time).
But, as with everything, there’s always something to learn. And that’s part of the fun. Which brings us to the subject itself. We all are used to HTML Entities – some more that others – and several languages already have functions that help convert these special characters to HTML Entities, but nevertheless there are always some characters we do not use very often and require for a quick peak in order to include them in our code.
So, with that in mind, I gathered a bunch of them in one place. Here. Enjoy!
Dashes & Bullets
– dash | –
— another dash | —
⋅ small dot | ⋅
• dot | •
◊ lozenge | ◊
Quotation marks
‘ quotes ’ | ’ / ‘
“ double quotes ” | ” / “
❛ fat quotes ❞ | ❛ / ❞
trademark & copyright
Trademark ™ | ™
© Copyright | ©
Registered ® | ®
Currency
¢ Cents | ¢
£ Pound | £
¥ Yen | ¥
€ Euro | €
Arrows & directions
→ next | →
← previous | ←
» right arrows | »
« left arrows | «
› right arrow | ’
‹ left arrow | ‘
↑ top | ↑
⇐ previous | ⇐ (note that the “A” should be capitalized)
⇒ next | ⇒ (note that the “A” should be capitalized)
Return ↵ | ↵
Left ↔ Right | ↔
☞ forward | ☞
☜ back | ☜
Other
☎ Phone | ☎
✉ Email | ✉
✍ Sign here | ✍
✎ Edit | ✎
✓ Done | ✓
☑ Check | ☑
☒ Uncheck | ☒
✗ Delete | ✗
⊕ Add | ⊕
⊗ Remove | ⊗
† Cross | †
♫ Music | ♫
✄ Cut | ✄
✁ Coupon code | ✁
∞ Link | ∞
♨ Hot items | ♨
☢ Lab | ☢
✈ Flight | ✈
℗ parking | ℗
☠ Danger! | ☠
☣ Chemical | ☣
☯ Tai Chi | ☯
☮ Peace | ☮
♂ Male | ♂
☰ Row | ☰
♥ Favorites | ♥
★ Popular | ★
☆ Star | ☆
☺ Smile | ☹ UnSmile
Temperature
☂ Tempreature: 29° | ☂ / °
26 ℃ / 60 ℉ / ☃ | ℃ / ℉ / ☃
Cards
♤ Spade | ♧ Club | ♡ Heart | ♢ Diamond
Poker: ♠ | ♣ | ♥ | ♦
♔ Crown | ♕ Queen | ♖ Rook Rank | ♘ Anothe Crown | ✠ Cross
Mathematical Symbols
1¼ ÷ 5¾ × 2 ≤ 5 = ¿ -> 1¼ ÷ 5¾ × 2 ≤ 5 = ¿
This article was inspired in an article in CSS Orbit.