HTML: ASCII Character Codes

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The table below presents all ASCII characters with codes from 32-127 and 160-255. The missing characters (0-31 and 128-159) are 'control characters' and not normally suited for output in HTML. The 'Entity' column gives the equivalent HTML character entity - where one exists.

Simple ASCII encoding

If you're looking for a way to encode text - for protecting email links for example - you can use this form to encode a short string:

For other types of encoding in JavaScript or PHP refer to the article Escaping Special Characters. Encoding is handled by PHP using an Ajax request triggered on keyup.

HTML Character Codes and Entities

The following table is dynamically generated to show all characters from 32 to 255:

For details on non-ASCII characters supported in HTML follow the link under References below.

So why do we need all these different ways of referencing the same characters? The Decimal values are rarely used, but Octal codes turn up in various programming languages and the Hex values in URL-encoded strings (%20 representing a space character for example).

In HTML mark-up the Symbol is used except where a proper Character Entity is available - for characters that have their own meaning in HTML such as angled brackets and quotes.

For more information on encoding special characters see the related article linked below.

Common Windows-1251 Character Codes

If your data has been polluted with Windows-specific characters such as smart quotes, ellipses, dashes and non-breaking spaces, the following list might be useful:

Other replacement values are also possible including various valid HTML entities (see above) or multibyte characters.

The reason for the \ in front of the Octal code for these characters is so that we can use them in regular expressions as shown here:

You might find this necessary when converting data to UTF-8 or other multibyte character formats to avoid replacing one byte of a multibyte character with something else and corrupting the text.

For non-multibyte formats you can use the regular preg_replace or ereg_replace functions instead as there's no danger of corruption.

References

• W3C: Character entity references in HTML 4
• Windows Code Page 1251

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