HTML Course

Computers do not store "letters"; they store bits and bytes. A Character Set is like a dictionary that tells the computer which number represents which character.


What is UTF-8?

At LearnHTML, we always recommend using UTF-8. It is the standard for the modern web because it covers almost all characters and symbols in the world.

Common HTML Character Reference

Below is a quick-access table for the most common characters used in web development.


Number Char Description
32   Space
33 ! Exclamation mark
34 " Quotation mark
35 # Number sign (Hash)
36 $ Dollar sign
38 & Ampersand
60 < Less-than sign
62 > Greater-than sign
169 © Copyright symbol
174 ® Registered trademark
128 € Euro sign

Understanding the Standards

  1. ASCII: The original standard. It only included 128 characters (English letters, numbers, and basic symbols).
  2. ANSI / ISO-8859-1: An extension of ASCII that added international characters (like Ç or ß).
  3. UTF-8: The king of web encoding. It includes everything from ASCII plus thousands of international characters, including Emojis!

Special Character Reference (Quick Scan)


ID Symbol Name
161 ¡ Inverted !
162 ¢ Cent sign
163 £ Pound sign
165 ¥ Yen sign
177 ± Plus-Minus

LearnHTML Implementation Tip

To ensure your website displays these characters correctly, always include this <meta> tag inside your <head> section:


HTML

<meta charset="UTF-8"l>

Why this matters?

If you don't define the charset, a browser might display "junk" characters (like é) instead of the correct ones (like é).

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HTML Basic
  1. HTML Basic
  2. HTML Element
  3. HTML Attributes
  4. HTML Headings
  5. HTML Paragrapha
  6. HTML Tables
  7. HTML Lists
HTML Advance
  1. HTML Div
  2. HTML Classes
  3. HTML Id
  4. HTML Buttons
  5. HTML Iframes
  6. HTML Symbols
  7. HTML Emojis