Shortcuts to Common Character Entities

Columns II and III display the numerical and the entity-name code forms, respectively, for the characters shown in Column I.
Just scrape them up from the displayed page and paste them into the NotePad/WordPad HTML document you’re editing.

Column V displays the NotePad/WordPad characters that can be used in HTML files to get browsers to display the characters indicated in Column I. These too can just be scraped up from the displayed page and pasted into your HTML document — provided that care is taken to ensure that ISO-8859-2 is specified as the rendering standard the browser is to be using.

The HTML for this page is using those characters to generate the content of column VI — to see how browsers change the appearance of that column in response to changes in their encoding expectations, just

click View (in the browser menu bar),
click Encoding (MS IE), or Character Coding (Netscape),
select a different encoding standard,

and watch how Column VI changes. A few standbys:   ISO-8859-2   |   ISO-8859-1   |   Windows-1252   |   Windows-1250   |   IBM-852   |   UTF-8.
 
For related punctuation problems, see below.

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I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Character	& # code ; for this character	& name ; for this character	Character Description	Note Pad or Word Pad character corresponding (but suitable only for Central European ISO (ISO-8859-2) encoding)	Current rendering of entity invoked by character shown in Column V
A,: Ą	Ą		A ogonek	¡	→ ¡
a,: ą	ą		a ogonek	±	→ ±
C’: Ć	Ć			Æ	→ Æ
c’: ć	ć			æ	→ æ
E, Ę	Ę		E ogonek	Ê	→ Ê
e,: ę	ę		e ogonek	ê	→ ê
L/: Ł	Ł			£	→ £
l/: ł	ł			³	→ ³
N’: Ń	Ń			Ñ	→ Ñ
n’: ń	ń			ñ	→ ñ
O’: Ó, Ó	Ó	Ó		Ó	→ Ó
o’: ó, ó	ó	ó		ó	→ ó
S’: Ś	Ś			¦	→ ¦
s’: ś	ś			¶	→ ¶
Z’: Ź	Ź			¬	→ ¬
z’: ź	ź			¼	→ ¼
Z·: Ż	Ż		Z kropka	¯	→ ¯
z·: ż	ż		z kropka	¿	→ ¿
NonBrkSpace		 	NonBreakingSpace
Shi: し	し
Ma: ま	ま
Ne: ね	ね
Ta (rice field): 田	田

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When it comes to punctuation, however, the characters NotePad/WordPad generates, shown in Column V, are good only in Western or Central European Windows encodings; to achieve the desired characters via ISO-8859-2, one needs to do a systematic search/replace routine to replace the ill-performing Column V characters with their Column II or Column III equivalents.

Again, follow the View | Encoding steps above to see (in Column VI) how browsers mangle the Column 5 characters as their encoding expectations change; or, choose any of the following:   ISO-8859-2   |   ISO-8859-1   |   Windows-1252   |   Windows-1250   |   IBM-852   |   UTF-8.

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I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Character	& # code ; for this character	& name ; for this character	Character       Description	Note Pad or Word Pad character corresponding (but suitable mainly for CE and WE Windows (1250, 1252) encodings, and not ISO-8859-2)	Current rendering (ISO-8859-1 = WE-ISO) of entity invoked by character shown in Column V
‚ ‚	‚	‚		‚	→ ‚
„ „	„	„		„	→ „
“ “	“	“		“	→ “
” ”	”	”		”	→ ”
‘; ‘	‘	‘		‘	→ ‘
’; ’	’	’		’	→ ’
© ©	©	©		©	→ ©
• •	•	•	Bullet	•	→ •
· ·	·	·	Middle Dot	·	→ ·
— —	—	—	em-Dash	—	→ —
– –	–	–	en-Dash	–	→ –

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First posted: 07 May 2006; last updated: 13 May 2006.