Website Coding: ASCII Special Characters

Many Content Management System (CMS) users who have entered what are referred to as “special characters” into the CMS have run into the situation where those characters do not show up as intended once they are live on the site. In this tutorial we’ll show you the way they are supposed to appear, the numerical code and the hex code for these characters to avoid these problems in the future.





Most of these special characters are a part of the ISO Latin Alphabet No. 1 table. The ISO Latin Alphabet is not latin characters, that is, not ONLY latin characters. It also includes special characters, letters with accents and other diacritical marks, as well as scientific and currency symbols.





We are going to show you the basic ASCII codes that you are likely to run into below, however there are a bunch of other codes that you may run into if you are into publishing content in foreign languages. There are many articles available on the subject, however this article from Penn State on computing with accents, symbols and foreign scripts should cover all those that aren’t shown below. Their homepage is shown below:

Getting back to the subject, here are the ASCII codes to keep your content looking proper! [editor’s note: this chart was created using information obtained from several ASCII charts]