I was just wondering whether diacritics need to be transformed to entities or can be just copy-pasted into my source code, providing that I have <meta charset="UTF-8"> in my <head> section of my document.
I remember that diacritics for a specific language render only if the browser's language is set to that specific language. Otherwise, strange characters will be displayed. Am I right? What can I do to make sure that certain diacritics will display correctly in any language regardless the browser's language?
Thanks!
With UTF-8 setting in <head> it works without problems. ľščťžýáíäňôř
Related
Rookie question.
Would guys recommend using Html ASCII or does the browser handle this part? I was reading through W3Schools and I’m just curious if this is something I should always consider as a good habit.
It's always a good idea to include <meta charset="UTF-8"> in the <head> of your HTML documents. This lets the browser know that your document is encoded with Unicode.
It's perfectly fine to use Unicode characters in an HTML document, but it's better to use HTML entity names or entity numbers.
(see a list of entity names and numbers and learn more on
w3schools.)
According to w3schools,
If you use an HTML entity name or a hexadecimal number,
the character will always display correctly.
This is independent of what character set (encoding) your page uses!
This means that entity names and numbers are guaranteed to work, even if you don't put <meta charset="UTF-8"> in the <head> of the document.
I'm writing a paragraph that requires me to use a Greek word that means something else, but when I put the Greek word into my text editor and save it, it looks weird in my browser. I tried using a span but it still shows the same weird code.
<p>Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch
(which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and
articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives
from Greek <span lang="el">μουσική</span> (mousike; "art of the Muses").</p>
Perhaps your page is being interpreted using the wrong charset, try adding <meta charset="UTF-8"> inside your <head> element. This tells the browser how to interpret more complex characters like you described.
Make sure this tag is present in your head:
<meta charset="utf-8">
ANSI and ISO charsets are the default when that tag is not present. ISO (the newest of those two) only supports 256 characters. UTF-8 character set allows you to use unicode characters directly in your HTML page.
That meta tag tells the browser to interpret your HTML page with the correct character set.
Check out the wikipedia page on ISO 8859-1 for more info. Also, here's the utf-8 wikipedia page.
Edit
As Juhana pointed out in the comments, make sure your editor is set to the appropriate encoding as well (most programming/web-specific editors, like Sublime for example, should do this by default, but other multi-purpose text editors may not.)
I want to display an "a" in html with bar over it..as in ā. Like I want to write āyush.
I also used overline but that makes it ugly.
Pasting the characted in html gives a-.
In html it is ā (lowercase) or Ā (uppercase).
Replace it with ā
See an example here
Make sure you set your charset in the head of the document.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You haven't given us enough info to be certain, but this is likely to be an encoding issue. I would guess that the character set you're sending the page in is probably just the default and doesn't include any extended characters.
You need to serve the page as UTF-8.
Add this to your <head> block:
<meta charset="utf-8">
that should be sufficient to fix it.
If you can't change the character set for whatever reason, you could send the character as a HTML entity -- find out the numeric entity code for it and use the &#xxx; notation (where xxx is the character code you require).
You have two main options: use character references like &x#101;, or insert the character “ā” using a tool that does not munge it. In the former case, you need not worry about character encodings, but some other characters may have similar issues without your noticing it. In the latter case, you need to make sure that the character encoding is properly set; see the W3C document Character encodings. Note that setting a meta tag may or may not be sufficient, depending on server.
Either way, there can be font problems. For example, a browser might pick up a glyph for “ā” from a font that is very different from the one used for “a”, causing typographic mess. To avoid this, use a font-family list containing a good selection of fonts containing all the characters you need. More info: Guide to using special characters in HTML.
i have a website in which i have to put some lines in Arabic.... how to do it...
where to get the Arabic text characters... how to make the page support Arabic...
i have to put a line per page and there is a lotta lotta pages so can't go around making images and putting them...
This is the answer that was required but everybody answered only part one of many.
Step 1 - You cannot have the multilingual characters in unicode document.. convert the document to UTF-8 document
advanced editors don't make it simple for you... go low level...
use notepad to save the document as meName.html & change the encoding
type to UTF-8
Step 2 - Mention in your html page that you are going to use such characters by
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
Step 3 - When you put in some characters make sure your container tags have the following 2 properties set
dir='rtl'
lang='ar'
Step 4 - Get the characters from some specific tool\editor or online editor like i did with Arabic-Keyboard.org
example
<p dir="rtl" lang="ar" style="color:#e0e0e0;font-size:20px;">رَبٍّ زِدْنٍي عِلمًا</p>
NOTE: font type, font family, font face setting will have no effect on special characters
The W3C has a good introduction.
In short:
HTML is a text markup language. Text means any characters, not just ones in ASCII.
Save your text using a character encoding that includes the characters you want (UTF-8 is a good bet). This will probably require configuring your editor in a way that is specific to the particular editor you are using. (Obviously it also requires that you have a way to input the characters you want)
Make sure your server sends the correct character encoding in the headers (how you do this depends on the server software you us)
If the document you serve over HTTP specifies its encoding internally, then make sure that is correct too
If anything happens to the document between you saving it and it being served up (e.g. being put in a database, being munged by a server side script, etc) then make sure that the encoding isn't mucked about with on the way.
You can also represent any unicode character with ASCII
You not only have to put the meta tag, telling that it is UTF-8 but really make the document UTF-8. You can do that with good editors (like notepad++) by converting them to "unicode" or "UTF-8 without BOM". Than you can simply use arabic characters
As this page is UTF-8, here are some examples (I hope I don't write anything rude here): شغف
If you use a server side scripting language make sure that it does not output the page in a different encoding. In PHP e.g. you can set it like this:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
If you don't even know where to get Arabic characters, but you want to display them, then you're doing something wrong.
Save files containing Arabic characters with encoding UTF-8. A good editor allows you to set the character encoding.
In the HTML page, place the following after <head>:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
If you're using XHTML:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
That's it.
An alternative way (without messing with the encoding of a file), is using HTML escape sequences. This website does that jobs for you: http://www.htmlescape.net/
Won't you need the ensure the area where you display the Arabic is Right-to-Left orientated also?
e.g.
<p dir="rtl">
i edit the html page with notepad ++ ,set encoding to utf-8 and its work
As mentioned above, by default text editors will not use UTF-8 as the standard encoding for documents.
However most editors will allow you to change that in the settings. Even for each specific document.
Check you have <meta charset="utf-8"> inside head block.
I am having problem to display the special characters like ’, é in Firefox and IE. But these characters are supported for the local server.
I have used the following
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Can anyone suggest me what the might be? Thanks in advance.
You've set the charset to iso-8859-1 - are you sure that's how they're encoded in your HTML?
In Firefox, try changing the charset using View -> Character Encoding (for your page it should have "Western (ISO-8859-1)" selected), and see if it works with another character encoding. If it does, consider either re-encoding your HTML into UTF-8, or changing the charset in your meta tag.
As Dominic says, checking you're encoding your HTML with the right charset in your meta tag would be the first step. There's info on charsets and encoding here. Whether you need to change the charset meta tag depends on the language the page is in. If your page is in English but just has the odd character that needs accents etc., the easiest way is to use the character code, for example the character code for é is é One of the many lists of character entities available online can be found here.
Alternatively, if your page is basically in English, but has small sections in another language, CSS2 has a lang attribute that can be used to style text in other languages appropriately. There's more info about the four different ways to apply language styles here. You can use the :lang() pseudo-class selector, the [lang |= "..."] selector that matches the beginning of the value of a language attribute, the [lang = "..."] selector that exactly matches the value of a language attribute, or a generic class or id selector.
If a small portion of your site was in another language such as Hebrew, you could also use CSS and a span to signify a change in the reading direction of the text, for example:
<p style="direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed;">
This is a paragraph written right-to-left.
</p>
or
<p>
This paragraph is written left-to-right except for <span style="direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override;">these words</span> which were written right-to-left.
</p>
These examples (taken from here) show the style being applied inline, but you could also set the styles up in an external stylesheet).
You've set the charset in the document's meta tag, which works when you're viewing it as a file, but if the web server is providing a charset value, that takes priority. Check the HTTP headers that the web server is providing; one way is with the Firefox extension Live HTTP Headers. If it's something different, you have to tell the web server what you're doing or else reencode the document to match.
How to set the encoding varies between web servers. Apache, for example, lets you specify the charset globally, per-file in .htaccess, or by renaming the file to example.html.latin1.
Use HTML Entities like á or á and the browser should sort it out.
Here is a list:
http://www.utexas.edu/learn/html/spchar.html
change your encoding meta tag to:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />