Instructables Text Formatting

Step 8 Character Entities and Extended Codes

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Note: The IbleFormatter does not handle character entities well. If you use entities, and go back to re-edit the text, some of them will be "stuck" as embedded special characters, which will subsequently have extra "garbage" characters attached to them.

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HTML (and the I'bles Formatter) provides named "entities" for a number of characters beyond the normal keyboard (ASCII) set, using strings of the form "&name;". These (the ISO Latin-1 character set) cover primarily the Western European languages with accents and umlauts, and some simple mathematical symbols. The left table, below, shows the ASCII codes, with entity names for a few characters.

The same characters (and even some normal ASCII) are also available using their numerical codes, as "&#code;". All of the ISO Latin-1 characters, with their codes and entity names, are listed in the right-hand table, below.

If you think you've seen this before, you're experiencing déjà vu.

If you think you've seen this before, you're experiencing déjà vu.

_{^{& amp;eacute; - & amp;agrave;}}

To put literal brackets into your text [rather than hyperlinks], use ASCII codes 91 and 93.

To put literal brackets into your text [rather than hyperlinks], use ASCII codes 91 and 93.

_{^{& amp;#91; - & amp;#93;}}

HTML 4.0 also supports the full Unicode set of characters, with numerical codes greater than 255. These include the non-Latin European alphabets (Greek, Cyrillic, etc.) as well as numerous Asian character sets. For more info, check out these links:

• Unicode Characters as Named and Numeric HTML Entities
• ASCII table.
• Entities for Symbols and Greek Letters (use the "Decimal" column).

Here are some of the codes and what is displayed.