The euro (€) is the official currency in 22 European states.
In HTML there are different possibilities to display the sign €:
€
€
€
Which one would you use in HTML? I think no representation is supported in all browsers. It's a pity that there is no standard way to display the sign.
Can you recommend one of the representations? What are the differences? Which ist supported best?
I hope you can help me. Thank you very much in advance!
Which one would you use in HTML?
None of them. Use an appropriate encoding (i.e.: UTF-8 or another Unicode transform) and use the charcter directly. Do not use HTML entities if at all avoidable, since they’ve got no advantage over use of a proper encoding.
Also, this is wrong:
It's a pity that there is no standard way to display the sign.
There is, and it’s the way I’ve described. Literally every browser, down to and including MSIE 5 will display Unicode characters correctly if the chosen fond supports the glyph.
The only valid reason to not use Unicode characters and instead fall back to entities might be projects that use legacy software which doesn’t support Unicode well. But that should never happen, right?
According to Google Doctype € is supported in all browsers. But maybe not all fonts.
edit
I also agree with Konrad Rudolph, use the character directly if you can.
From Google's HTML/CSS styleguide:
Do not use entity references.
There is no need to use entity references like —, ”, or ☺, assuming the same encoding (UTF-8) is used for files and editors as well as among teams.
The only exceptions apply to characters with special meaning in HTML (like < and &) as well as control or “invisible” characters (like no-break spaces).
<!-- Not recommended -->
The currency symbol for the Euro is “&eur;”.
<!-- Recommended -->
The currency symbol for the Euro is “€”.
You should really just test it and specify those browsers that support it as minimum requirements. This eases your workload considerably since it makes the user responsible :-) Or, alternatively, use the word "euro" or the "EUR" curruncy designator (like USD, AUD, JPY and so on).
I use as you can see here : it works in Firefox, Chrome and IE at least.
The accepted answer is actually awful,at least as of today. Best choice is to use €
is not Unicode, btw, even though it works. It's ANSI. JavaScript String.fromCodePoint(128) will give you a control character you won't even be able to see. Stay away from that.
If you're going to use plain UTF-8 text for symbols you might end up having mistakes after changing db properties, or if you're just typing it into file, once you accidentally copy it into an ANSI-coded, or some a file with some other encoding. Been there.
Related
like the house/home symbol is ⌂, I need the most popular symbol codes for a website, like contact us, about us, home, etc.
Thanks in advance for any help.
The notation ⌂ (which should really include the semicolon) is just a reference to the character with Unicode code number 8962 in decimal. You can use similar notations for all Unicode characters, so the ultimate reference would be the Unicode Standard, and in practice you might want to look at the Code Charts for symbols there. The symbol denoted by ⌂, U+2302 HOUSE, is in the Miscellaneous Technical block.
However, most Unicode characters are not supported by most fonts. The real problem with using special characters like “⌂” is with font support and with users’ difficulties in guessing what you mean by such characters (if the users are lucky enough to see them). This is why images are generally recommended for icon-like symbols.
Is there a way to put a ▐ (ascii value of 222) in html character codes? (e.g. Þ)?
Is this possible? If not, is there some way to make sure it is reliably rendered by a browser?
Using the official W3 Character Reference sheet, we can find what you're looking for. You have several options:
█
█
█
█
▮
▮
▮
▮
❘
❘
❘
❘
You can then take this a step further by looking into various Unicode regions. This region has a few similar lines:
▌
▌
▍
▍
▎
▎
▏
▏
▐
▐
Note that you'll have to perform browser tests yourself, as not all browsers will be able to render these symbols. Ensuring that your page is in an appropriate UTF format (i.e. UTF-8) will help greatly.
I don't know from where you got "ascii value of 222". ASCII only goes to 127.
The character appears (to me) to be a U+2590 RIGHT HALF BLOCK. In HTML you can use ▐.
is there some way to make sure it is reliably rendered by a browser?
Yes: encode your document as UTF-8 (really – it’s the default on the web and the best choice nowadays) and include the character directly in the document.
Every modern text editor / IDE supports saving documents as UTF-8. To serve it to the browser, specify the encoding in the <head> section:
<meta charset="utf-8">
(This is HTML5; older versions are slightly different) and specify it in the HTTP header when serving the document from a server. Most servers are already configured to do this correctly.
HTML escape sequences, while still useful in certain scenarios, are by no means the easiest way of using arbitrary characters in HTML code.
Also, as others have noted, there’s some confusion here: ASCII only goes up to 127, there’s no ASCII character 222. Furthermore, ASCII is severely outdated and used almost nowhere nowadays. Most of the time, when somebody says “ASCII” they mean something else, and unfortunately they always mean different things. This is another reason to use Unicode and UTF-8 throughout: it avoids confusion.
I believe you have answered your own question. The other HTML entity for that character is Þ
Depending on your doctype, any compliant browser should render the character correctly.
Ok, so I want to have the characters from below in my html page. Seems easy, except I can't find the HTML encoding for them.
Note: I would like to do this without having sized elements, plain ol' text would be fine ^_^.
Cheers.
You can see that they have a unicode number of the selected character - at the bottom of the picture ("U+266A: Eighth Note").
Simply use the last portion in a unicode character entity: ♪ - ♪
If your page is already UTF-8, you can simply paste it in.
Try encoding it as █ - that should do the trick!
In a UTF-8 encoded page, just copy and paste them as-is.
Otherwise, use the number that the dialog gives you for each character, e.g. ♪
However, when working with rather exotic characters, be very wary of font support. See e.g. this question for background: Unicode support in Web standard fonts
This page gives some information about support for the characters you want to use. They seem to be relatively well supported, but a test on Linux and Mac machines won't hurt.
Here is one comprehensive entity reference. If you want to convert symbols into their entity counterparts, I suggest using this converter.
My suggestion is to use hexadecimal reference. ( it's easy dont worry :) )
for example, the first character you have highlighted in red got ascii value of 175, which is AF in hex.
So in short you can encode it using %AF, and so on...
is it clear mate? Let me know if you need further explanation or help about this :)
Edit: my post is meant for url encoding.
I would like to print some kind of ASCII "art" on a web page in pre-tags. These graphics use DOS characters to show a map like old maze games did. I didn't find anything in the HTML special character reference. Is there a way to use these characters in HTML ?
Thanks in advance.
With the right Unicode characters, the old character encodings shouldn't make much odds. The tricky bit may be converting existing ASCII art into Unicode - at which point you need to know the original encoding.
The relevant code charts will be listed on the Unicode "symbols" charts page. In particular, I suspect you'll find the box drawing and block elements charts useful.
You'll need to make sure that your page uses a font which contains the right characters, of course...
As an example, you can render this:
┌┐
└┘
With:
<pre>┌┐
└┘</pre>
Not quite a proper box, but getting there...
You can send them in the <pre> tags, although in XHTML you'll need to encapsulate it in <![CDATA[[]> I think. Be careful though, not all encodings render this correctly. For example, a lot of ASCII art designed for DOS code page 430 (US) fails over here in the UK (830). Eastern Europe suffers especially.
I think the best approach here would be to render images.
EDIT: Oh. You could try , but I'm not sure if that would work.
This has been confusing me for some time. With the advent of UTF-8 as the de-facto standard in web development I'm not sure in which situations I'm supposed to use the HTML entities and for which ones should I just use the UTF-8 character. For example,
em dash (–, &emdash;)
ampersand (&, &)
3/4 fraction (¾, ¾)
Please do shed light on this issue. It will be appreciated.
Based on the comments I have received, I looked into this a little further. It seems that currently the best practice is to forgo using HTML entities and use the actual UTF-8 character instead. The reasons listed are as follows:
UTF-8 encodings are easier to read and edit for those who understand what the character means and know how to type it.
UTF-8 encodings are just as unintelligible as HTML entity encodings for those who don't understand them, but they have the advantage of rendering as special characters rather than hard to understand decimal or hex encodings.
As long as your page's encoding is properly set to UTF-8, you should use the actual character instead of an HTML entity. I read several documents about this topic, but the most helpful were:
UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding
Wikipedia Special Characters Help
From the UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding article:
Wikipedia is a great case study for an
application that originally used
ISO-8859-1 but switched to UTF-8 when
it became far too cumbersome to support
foreign languages. Bots will now
actually go through articles and
convert character entities to their
corresponding real characters for the
sake of user-friendliness and
searchability.
That article also gives a nice example involving Chinese encoding. Here is the abbreviated example for the sake of laziness:
UTF-8:
這兩個字是甚麼意思
HTML Entities:
這兩個字是甚麼意思
The UTF-8 and HTML entity encodings are both meaningless to me, but at least the UTF-8 encoding is recognizable as a foreign language, and it will render properly in an edit box. The article goes on to say the following about the HTML entity-encoded version:
Extremely inconvenient for those of us
who actually know what character
entities are, totally unintelligible
to poor users who don't! Even the
slightly more user-friendly,
"intelligible" character entities like
θ will leave users who are
uninterested in learning HTML
scratching their heads. On the other
hand, if they see θ in an edit box,
they'll know that it's a special
character, and treat it accordingly,
even if they don't know how to write
that character themselves.
As others have noted, you still have to use HTML entities for reserved XML characters (ampersand, less-than, greater-than).
You don't generally need to use HTML character entities if your editor supports Unicode. Entities can be useful when:
Your keyboard does not support the character you need to type. For example, many keyboards do not have em-dash or the copyright symbol.
Your editor does not support Unicode (very common some years ago, but probably not today).
You want to make it explicit in the source what is happening. For example, the code is clearer than the corresponding white space character.
You need to escape HTML special characters like <, &, or ".
Entities may buy you some compatibility with brain-dead clients that don't understand encodings correctly. I don't believe that includes any current browsers, but you never know what other kinds of programs might be hitting you up.
More useful, though, is that HTML entities protect you from your own errors: if you misconfigure something on the server and you end up serving a page with an HTTP header that says it's ISO-8859-1 and a META tag that says it's UTF-8, at least your —es will always work.
I would not use UTF-8 for characters that are easily confused visually. For example, it is difficult to distinguish an emdash from a minus, or especially a non-breaking space from a space. For these characters, definitely use entities.
For characters that are easily understood visually (such as the chinese examples above), go ahead and use UTF-8 if you like.
Personally I do everything in utf-8 since a long time, however, in an html page, you always need to convert ampersands (&), greater than (>) and lesser then (<) characters to their equivalent entities, &, > and <
Also, if you intend on doing some programming using utf-8 text, there are a few thing to watch for.
XML needs some extra lines to validate when using entities.
Some libraries do not play along nice with utf-8. For instance, PHP in some Linux distributions dropped full support for utf-8 in their regular expression libraries.
It is harder to limit the number of characters in a text that uses html entities, because a single entity uses many characters. Also there's always the risk of cutting the entity in half.
HTML entities are useful when you want to generate content that is going to be included (dynamically) into pages with (several) different encodings. For example, we have white label content that is included both into ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 encoded web pages...
If character set conversion from/to UTF-8 wasn't such a big unreliable mess (you always stumble over some characters and some tools that don't convert properly), standardizing on UTF-8 would be the way to go.
If your pages are correctly encoded in utf-8 you should have no need for html entities, just use the characters you want directly.
All of the previous answers make sense to me.
In addition: It mostly depends on the editor you intent to use and the document language. As a minimum requirement for the editor is that it supports the document language. That means, that if your text is in japanese, beware of using an editor which does not show them (i.e. no entities for the document itself). If its english, you can even use an old vim-like editor and use entities only for the relative seldom © and friends.
Of course: > for > and other HTML-specials still need escapes.
But even with the other latin-1 languages (german, french etc.) writing ä is a pain in you know where...
In addition, I personally write entities for invisible characters and those which are looking similar to standard-ascii and are therefore easily confused. For example, there is u1173 (looking like a dash in some charsets) or u1175, which looks like the vertical bar. I'd use entities for those in any case.