ASCII Characters

Section 1 - Introduction
Section 2 - Basics
Section 3 - Next Level
      Lists
      Basic Tables
      Advanced Text
         Special Characters
         Block Quotes
         Random Text
         You Try It!
      Marquee
      Meta
      Sounds
      Comments
Section 4 - Advanced
Section 5 - Publishing
Section 6 - Extras
Appendices
Special Characters

§ú¶¶°šë you wanted to add to your document some characters that you can't find on your keyboard. So far, you have not been able to do this, but in this lesson, you'll find out that there are ways to incorporate special characters into your text.

On keyboards, there are special buttons you can press to get a special character. Suppose you wanted to write the French word for "French." Well, one of the characters looks like a small lettter "c" with a tail. This letter isn't found on our keyboards. In a program such as Word, it can be found in the special characters though. If you typed it out, it would read
Français

but you can't make this letter in HTML, until now.

To make that letter, the code you would type into your document is &231;
Here's how that looks:
Code
Ralph studies Fran&231;ais.
What you see
Ralph studies Français.
Notice that these are NOT tags. These are codes that you use to insert special characters. All of these codes starts with the & character, and all of them end with the ; character. In between may either go letters or numbers.

In the following table you will see a few of the characters that are commonly used, but for a complete list, please see Appendix B.
To get aYou typeTo get aYou type
&&¢¢
<&lt;>&gt;
©&copy;®&reg;
¿&iquest;½&frac12;
é&eacute;ñ&ntilde;

You may have noticed that all of these have words that describe them. For example the &cent; is the code to make the cent sign. It's not always this easy. Sometimes numbers are used instead of names.
To get aYou typeTo get aYou type
™ &#8482; ‡&#8225;
é &#233; ¢&#162;

You might note that the cent sign and the "acute e" both have numbers and names. This is true of most special characters. Don't worry about memorizing these. They'll be here when you need them, or about a thousand other places online. Just know that they exist and how to use them.

There is one special character which may come in very handy. That is a blank space. HTML will only allow for a single blank space between words and sentences. What do you do when you need more than one? Well, it's tricky, but the symbol for a blank space is &nbsp;. I like to think of it as "new blank space" so that I can remember it. I don't recommend using this a lot because there are better ways to format, but it's available.

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