Adding special characters to your HTML code

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Adding special characters to your text.

Did you know that HTML supports a complete special character
set? What are special characters? Probably the most often used by
most people are the Copyright ©, Trademark T and Registration ®
symbols.

Special Characters are symbols that are not usually available
directly from the keyboard. HTML supports a whole slew of them
defined by a simple code that is started by an & (ampersand) and
terminated by a ; (semicolon). The code for the copyright symbol ©
is © the Trademark symbol ™ is ™ and the Registration
symbol ® ® I have posted a complete set at
is3fig1.htm. We will leave
this page posted at this address for the foreseeable future so please
feel free to bookmark and refer to it as you need.

In addition to these special symbols, you can enter any ASCII
character using this special format by specifying its decimal code
preceded by a # (pound) symbol. If you don't know, the ASCII
character set represents every character on the keyboard plus all the
invisible characters. There are 256 ASCII characters all together
which is not so coincidentally, exactly the number of bit
combinations in a byte. The letter A is A the letter B is
B and so on. The ASCII decimal code for the copyright
symbol is 169 and is entered as © Many good computer
reference books include a table of all 256 ASCII characters. We will
post a copy on our site when we have time and let you know. You
should be careful using codes below 32 since many of these are used
for file control. The NULL character #000 in particular is used to
terminate an ASCII file and could cause you problems if you
attempt to use it.

Some very useful characters in the special character set include the
< (less than), > (greater than) and & (ampersand) characters. Why
are these so useful when they are readily available on the keyboard?
If you look at the is3fig1.htm Table, you will see the special character
codes listed. If they were entered the way you see them then the
browser would interpret the code and display the symbol instead of
displaying the code. In other words, in order to display the code
© I had to enter &copy; with the & replaced by its code
& In this way, if you want to display the >BODY< tag on a
HTML page you can type it as <BODY> in order to prevent
the browser from interpreting it as a HTML tag.

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"IMS Web Tips" ISSN 1488-7088
© Copyright 1999 Virtual Mechanics
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