Special characters

A useful reference, and a complete list of special characters in HTML.

In this article we are going to see a frequently consulted topic when learning to build a web page. They are the special characters, codes typical of the HTML language that browsers are able to understand and that serve to represent certain symbols.

The need for the existence of special characters responds to two reasons that we will explain below, highlighting which of them is currently important and why (updated in October 2016). At the end of the article you will also find tables with a wide set of special characters and their codes, to serve as a reference.

Later we will go into details, but to see an example, the “á” (accented lowercase a) is written “á” so the word page could be written in an HTML page like this: page.

Why do special characters exist?

The reasons why we must use special characters are the following:

1. A web page has to be viewed in different countries, which use different character sets. The HTML language offers us a mechanism by which we can be sure that a series of “weird” characters will look good on all computers in the world, regardless of their local character set.
2. On the other hand, certain characters are part of the labels such as the “major qué” or “minor qué” that delimit them. By means of the special characters some codes are defined, which we must use when we want to put one of these characters on a page,

Of these two reasons, the second is truly important, which is a matter derived from HTML itself and its coding needs. But the first reason, although it was important, today is not so important because the recommendation is to use UTF-8 and this set of characters does allow us to represent any of the symbols that we will normally need (all accents, ñ, Euro symbol , etc.).

Basic special characters

These are the special characters that are used in HTML so as not to confuse a beginning or end of tag, a quote or an & with its corresponding character.

HTML 2.0 special characters

Now we are going to look at special characters, although many of them are available in UTF-8, so if we follow the HTML5 recommendations for character sets, we don’t really need to use them.

HTML 3.2 special characters

Other special characters

Reference: There is a video tutorial on .com that deals with . They are not closely related topics, but surely it serves as practice to learn everything that has been discussed in this article.