non ascii char’s

ISO-8859-1

ISO-8859-1 has been the default character set in most browsers.
The first 128 characters of ISO-8859-1 is the original ASCII character-set (the numbers from 0-9, the uppercase and lowercase English alphabet, and some special characters).

The second part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 160-255) contains some characters used in Western European countries and some commonly used special characters.

Entities are used to implement reserved characters or to express characters that cannot easily be entered with the keyboard.

ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. 1, consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script, each encoded as a single 8-bit code value.

ISO/IEC 8859-1 suffers from a number of deficiencies, including the omission of a few French diacritics and the lack of a Euro symbol. For this reason ISO/IEC 8859-15 has been developed as an update of ISO/IEC 8859-1 to add the required additional characters. (This required however the removal of some less used characters from ISO/IEC 8859-1, including fraction symbols and letter-free diacritics: ¤, ¦, ¨, ´, ¸, ¼, ½ and ¾.)

The name Latin-1 is an informal alias unrecognized by ISO or the IANA, but is perhaps meaningful in some computer software.

The following table shows ISO-8859-1, with the 3-letter abbreviations for the control characters.

IBM PC or MS-DOS Codepage 437, often abbreviated to CP437 and also known as DOS-US or OEM-US, is the original character set of the IBM PC, circa 1981.

The following is a table representing CP437 using the equivalent Unicode characters:

The repertoire of CP437 was taken from the character set of Wang word-processing machines, as explicitly admitted by Bill Gates in the interview of him and Paul Allen in the 2nd of October 1995 edition of Fortune Magazine:

"... we were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine--you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday."

CP437 is inadequate for internationalisation, as it lacks characters necessary for some languages, such as À (capital A with grave) for French, and has only a few Greek letters. Later MS-DOS character sets, such as CP850 (DOS Latin-1), CP852 (DOS Central-European) and CP737 (DOS Greek), filled the gaps for international use while still being nearly compatible with CP437 by retaining the box-drawing characters. All CP437 characters are in Unicode and in Microsoft's WGL4 character set, therefore in most of the fonts on Microsoft Windows, and also in the VGA font of Linux, and the ISO 10646 fonts for X11.

· [·]     © [©]     ® [®]     ™ [™]     ' [']     ° [°] ex: 32°F

For info on more special characters see
HTML Escape Character Codes (and 'cursor over')

Reserved Characters in HTML

Some characters are reserved in HTML and XHTML. For example, you cannot use
the greater than or less than signs within your text because the browser could
mistake them for markup.

HTML and XHTML processors must support the five special characters listed in
the table below:

Note: Entity names are case sensitive!

ISO 8859-1 Symbols