Table of Codes to Create Special Characters

To enter a special character, hold down [ALT] key and type 0xxx, where xxx represents digits from the table. Have fun!

More explantation and notes are beneath the table, jump to it here.

What are special characters?

The phrase "special characters" refers to the variety of characters that can be typed into a computer and displayed on a screen, just like letters and numbers, but are not viewable on the keyboard. Special characters are primarily used to type foreign characters (and Egyptian Hieroglyphs!), for example, they allow you to send an e-mail that includes foreign characters. Most up to date e-mail programs allow you to do this, but you have to know the correct codes to use. They are also seen online in smileys :-§

To enter a special character, hold down [ALT] key and type 0xxx, where xxx represents digits from the above tables. (This will also let you use special characters in Word documents, without the hassle of setting up special code pages and keyboards.)

UNICODE Characters

***The rest of this explanation is more technical and has to do with the below table***

If you are writing an HTML or XML document, you have a much greater choice if you use UNICODE character code. In fact it is preferable to use UNICODE rather than ISO-8859 code. The correct characters will be recognized by all Browsers that adhere to International standards. You have a choice of using decimal code or hexadecimal code.

To enter a character in decimal UNICODE , type: &#xxx; (where xxx represent digits from the following table.)

For example, on the following line you should see the symbols for Euro, British Pound and US Dollar, each repeated twice, first with Unicode, then with ISO 8859-1. €   € ,  £   £ ,  $   $ .   If any one of them does not show correctly, adjust the Character setting in your browser. (Past insights include Netscape4, go to: View/Character Set; In Netscape6 or 7 go to View/Character Coding (you may have to click "More" to see an additional menu with more choices); In MS Internet Explorer 5 go to View/Encoding. Mac/Netscape users : choose "open in browser" from File menu.)

Table of UNICODE codes

For Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Scandinavian and some other Central European Languages. The hexadecimal digits hhh used in the &#Xhhh; code.

NOTE: The character signs have been placed using Windows ([ALT]0xxxx) ISO 8859-1 coding. Therefore they will not show up correctly, if browser is not set for Western ISO 8859-1 character set. If you set browser for any other character set, in the Character column you will see the equivalent characters for the selected set. For example: If you select "Central European ISO-8859-2", you will see Czech, Hungarian and Polish characters, However, if you select "Central European Windows", you will still see Czech, Hungarian and Polish characters, but some of them are in different positions on the chart, because Microsoft does not strictly follow international standards! If you select "Cyrillic ISO-8859-5", you will see Russian characters. If you select "Unicode (UTF-8)" you will only see rectangles, because Unicode expects to see the "&#xxx;" coding, not the "[ALT]0xxx" used in preparing this chart. Your screen driver may not allow you to see all characters correctly, for some sets. Likewise, your printer may not be able to print all sets.

English and North American browsers automatically select ISO-8859-1. Central European browsers automatically select ISO-8859-2. However, if the characters are written in Unicode, then all modern browsers will read the characters correctly, because every character in every language has been assigned a unique code. That is why it is desirable to use Unicode when preparing HTML or XML documents.

UNICODE charts are here