ATTENTION: The guide below shows you how to properly enter special characters in your messages—curly quotes, long dashes, symbols, and accented and non-Roman characters (like Cyrillic, Hebrew and Japanese kana). It explains what HTML character references are, why and when people should be using them, how to encode the common ones, and where they can go for more information. Also described are the display problems that occur when people don't encode such characters properly and some tools that help you convert or insert text.

This thread is not intended as a discussion thread. You may post corrections, questions and additional material to be incorporated into the guide, but comments on display problems or improvements to Mudcat character handling should be posted instead to the thread Tech: Non-ASCII character display problems.

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Recent changes:

• 14 Feb 2011: Charts added for Czech, Slovak and Polish.
• 13 Feb 2011: Charts added for Esperanto, Irish, Gaelic and Welsh.
• 12 Feb 2011: How to Encode: Reference to CopyUnicode utility added.
• 12 Feb 2011: How to Encode: Description of HtmlEsc utility updated. It is now available as a downloadable JAR, easily used by anyone.
• 12 Feb 2011: Mnemonic escapes: Table of some additional characters added.
• 11 Feb 2011: Message added describing the display problem in more detail.

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This is an edited PermaThread® for the description of HTML character references. This thread will be edited by Artful Codger, who will consolidate the information posted here into a technical guide. Feel free to post to this thread, but remember that all messages posted here are subject to editing or deletion.

-Joe Offer-