Html text encoding is a way to represent characters in a way that can be understood by computers. This is necessary because computers can only understand numbers, not letters or special characters.
In the early days of computing, characters were represented using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). This encoding scheme used a 7-bit code to represent 128 characters, including letters, numbers, and symbols.
A major limitation of ASCII was that it couldn't handle non-English characters. To address this, Unicode was developed, which uses a 16-bit code to represent over 100,000 characters from many languages.
For your interest: Edit Html Code
Character Encoding Basics
Character encoding is a fundamental concept in HTML text encoding, and it's essential to understand the basics to ensure your content displays correctly. UTF-8 is an international standard that can encode over 1,112,000 different characters.
Using the wrong character encoding can lead to jumbled text, as seen with the ISO-8859-1 character set, which only accounts for Latin characters and symbols, excluding many Eastern symbols and glyphs.
UTF-8 is foolproof when using HTML entities for special characters, ensuring they display correctly across different encoding methods.
Suggestion: Data Text Html Charset Utf 8 Base64
Description
Character encoding can be a bit confusing, but it's actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. The function htmlspecialchars() is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except that it translates all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents into these entities.
htmlentities() is a function that's similar to htmlspecialchars(), but it takes it a step further by translating all characters with HTML character entity equivalents. This is useful when you want to make sure that your text is safe to display on a webpage.
The get_html_translation_table() function can be used to return the translation table used by htmlentities(), depending on the provided flags constants. This is a handy tool to have in your toolkit.
If you want to decode instead of encode, you can use the html_entity_decode() function. This is the reverse of htmlentities(), and it's useful when you need to get the original text back.
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is a crucial aspect of character encoding, as it helps readers understand how words should be spoken. This is where HTML pronunciation characters come into play.
HTML pronunciation characters are used to represent the sounds of words in a text. They can be used in HTML code to help readers understand the pronunciation of a word. For example, the character ă is used to represent the sound "æ" in the word "cat".
Here are some common HTML pronunciation characters and their uses:
These characters can be used in HTML code to help readers understand the pronunciation of a word. For example, if you want to represent the sound "æ" in the word "cat", you can use the character ă.
Diacritics
Diacritics are special marks that can change the pronunciation or meaning of a word. They're like a secret code that helps you understand the language.
You might have noticed that some letters have extra marks on top or below them. These are diacritics, and they can be tricky to work with, especially if you're not familiar with them.
In HTML, you can use special codes to display diacritics correctly. For example, the Grave Accent character is represented by the code ``` or ```.
Here's a list of some common diacritics and their HTML codes:
As you can see, there are many different diacritics and each one has its own unique code. Knowing these codes can help you display diacritics correctly on your website or in your documents.
Special Characters and Icons
Special characters and icons are a fun part of HTML. You can use them to add visual interest to your website.
HTML offers a wide range of special characters, such as hearts, gender icons, musical notes, and arrows. These can be used freely on your website.
You can find a list of special characters and icons in the HTML icon list, but it's not included in this article.
Character Encoding in Specific Languages
Character encoding can be a bit tricky, especially when dealing with specific languages. For example, Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages have unique characters that aren't included in the standard ASCII subset of Unicode.
Some of these characters include the capital A-acute (Á) and lowercase a-acute (á), which are represented by the HTML codes Á and á respectively. You'll also find the capital A-cedille (Ą) and lowercase a-cedille (ą) in this language, which are represented by Ą and ą.
Here's a list of some of the unique characters used in Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages:
These are just a few examples of the unique characters used in Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages. By understanding these characters and their corresponding HTML codes, you can ensure that your website or application is accessible to users who speak these languages.
Czech, Slovak & Slovenian
Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian language speakers often use special characters that aren't included in the standard ASCII subset of Unicode.
The Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages use characters like Á, Ą, Ä, and É, which have specific HTML codes and entity numbers. For example, the character Á is represented by Á and has an entity number of Á.
Here's a list of some of the special characters used in the Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages:
These characters can be used to represent the unique sounds and diacritical marks found in the Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian languages.
Displaying the Output
You can finally display the HTML-encoded output after handling text conversion. To do this, simply call the converted text.
If you want to display the output string as raw HTML markup, use a pre tag instead of a div tag. This is because you would target the pre element's textContent instead of innerHTML.
If this caught your attention, see: Text Html Style Tag
Email Character Encoding
Email character encoding is a crucial aspect of HTML text encoding, ensuring that special characters and symbols render correctly in email subject lines and bodies.
To guarantee 100% correct rendering, convert special characters and symbols to their HTML entities, which begin with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. For example, the HTML entity is used for non-breaking spaces.
Additional reading: Symbols for Html Coding
The safest solution is to use HTML entities for special characters like & (ampersand), ® (registered trademark), and £ (British pound). Here are some common special characters and their HTML entities:
UTF-8 is the best character encoding for emails due to its comprehensiveness, supporting over 1,112,000 different characters. This includes all written languages, math symbols, musical notations, and emojis used in email marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is text/html charset UTF-8?
Meta charset UTF-8 enables the use of non-ASCII characters, such as emojis, on webpages. It allows for more diverse and visually engaging content, but requires proper HTML tagging
What is %20 in HTML encoding?
%20 is a URL-encoded space, used to represent a space character in a URL when it needs to be transmitted or stored
Sources
- https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
- https://psdtowp.net/html-codes-special-characters.html
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/04/converting-text-encoded-html-vanilla-javascript/
- https://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/encode-decode.html
- https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/the_importance_of_content-type_character_encoding_in_html_emails/
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