Special Characters Test Page

Windows characters outside Latin-1

These are Windows characters with codes from 128 to 159. They look correct when viewed in browsers on a Windows PC (except perhaps for the recently added euro sign), but may not look right on Macs and UNIX machines.

Numeric entity	Description	Actual numeric
	euro sign	€
	right single quotation mark (apostrophe)	’
	bullet character	•
	en dash	–
	em dash	—

Latin-1 characters outside Macintosh set

These characters should look correct on both Windows and UNIX machines, but will not look right on a Mac. They may get substituted by similar-looking characters on the Mac (i.e., non-superscripted numerals, letter "x" instead of multiplication sign).

Numeric entity	Named entity	Description	Actual numeric	Actual named
²	²	superscript two	²	²
³	³	superscript three	³	³
×	×	multiplication cross	×	×

Characters in both Latin-1 and Macintosh sets

These characters ought to look correct on all platforms.

Numeric entity	Named entity	Description	Actual numeric	Actual named
·	·	centered dot	·	·
µ	µ	mu (micro sign)	µ	µ
°	°	degree sign	°	°
±	±	plus or minus	±	±
ñ	ñ	lower case en tilde	ñ	ñ

Some Unicode characters

Unicode includes just about every character you might want (It allows 2¹⁶ possible characters, not all of which have been assigned yet). Ultimately, Unicode characters should be used in place of the first set above (the Windows characters from 128 to 159). Latin-1 is a proper subset of Unicode. Like Latin-1, Unicode does not assign characters to codes 128-159, which are regarded as extended control codes (If an old email system chops off the high-order bit, characters 128-159 are transformed into codes 0-31, which are the non-printable ASCII control codes).

Numeric entity	Named entity	Description	Actual numeric decimal	Actual numeric hex	Actual named
‘	‘	left single quotation mark	‘	‘	‘
’	’	right single quotation mark	’	’	’
“	“	left double quotation mark	“	“	“
”	”	right double quotation mark	”	”	”
•	•	bullet (black small circle)	•	•	•
−	−	minus sign	−	−	−
–	–	en dash	–	–	–
—	—	em dash	—	—	—
Ω	Ω	greek capital letter omega	Ω	Ω	Ω
β	β	greek small letter beta	β	β	β
γ	γ	greek small letter gamma	γ	γ	γ
θ	θ	greek small letter theta	θ	θ	θ
λ	λ	greek small letter lambda	λ	λ	λ
π	π	greek small letter pi	π	π	π
		thin space
′	′	single prime	′	′	′
″	″	double prime	″	″	″
∠	&ang;	angle sign	∠	∠	∠
€	€	euro sign	€	€	€

The following are attempts to use the Unicode "thin space" in a sentence. If you actually see a space in your browser, you can test whether it's a non-breaking space by varying the width of your browser window to see if you can force a line break at its position.

Sentence using Numeric entity for thin space:: The speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299 792 458 m/s.
Sentence using Named entity for thin space:: The speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299 792 458 m/s.

For reference on all the character entities on this page, see the list of Character entity references in HTML 4.0.