Unicode Character Reference for Bloggers

by Jeff Starr on Sunday, July 29, 2007 – Comments

[ Image: Two Hip Characters ] Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” characters. Some of these characters — such as quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes — are very common, while others — such as the copyright symbol, bullet, and arrow — happen less frequently. As a blogger, I find myself repeatedly using a select handful of very common special characters. Very rarely do I ever find myself blogging a latin “Ä” (i.e., capital letter “A” with a diaeresis). To save time and effort, I need a quick reference that targets only the characters I find useful as a blogger. With that in mind, I assembled the following table of essential Unicode (UTF-8 encoded) characters 1 for bloggers:

Essential Unicode Character Reference for Bloggers

Character Numeric Entity Named Entity Character Name
      Non-Breaking Space
« « « Left Double-Angle Quote
» » » Right Double-Angle Quote
‹ ‹ ‹ Left Single-Angle Quote
› › › Right Single-Angle Quote
“ “ “ Left Double Quote
” ” ” Right Double Quote
‘ ‘ ‘ Left Single Quote
’ ’ ’ Right Single Quote
" " " Straight Quote
' ' ' Apostrophe
‚ ‚ ‚ Single Low Quote
„ „ „ Double Low Quote
< &#060; &lt; Left Angle Bracket
> &#062; &gt; Right Angle Bracket
← &#8592; &larr; Left Arrow
→ &#8594; &rarr; Right Arrow
↑ &#8593; &uarr; Up Arrow
↓ &#8595; &darr; Down Arrow
– &#8211; &ndash; En Dash
— &#8212; &mdash; Em Dash
‾ &#8254; &oline; Overline
¦ &#166; &brvbar; Broken Vertical Bar
® &#174; &reg; Registered Symbol
© &#169; &copy; Copyright Symbol
™ &#8482; &trade; Trademark Symbol
& &#38; &amp; Ampersand
• &#8226; &bull; Bullet
· &#183; &middot; Middle Dot
¹ &#185; &sup1; Superscript 1
² &#178; &sup2; Superscript 2
³ &#179; &sup3; Superscript 3
¢ &#162; &cent; Cent Symbol
† &#8224; &dagger; Single Dagger
‡ &#8225; &Dagger; Double Dagger
~ &#126; &tilde; Tilde

1 To ensure proper display of the Unicode characters presented below, use this meta declaration in the head of your document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>

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Post #380 categorized as Blogging, Websites, last updated on Nov 3, 2009
Tagged with Blogging, code, reference, unicode, xhtml

About the author

[ Jeff Starr ]

Jeff Starr is a web developer, graphic designer and content producer with over 10 years of experience and a passion for quality and detail. Jeff is co-author of the book Digging into WordPress and strives to help people be the best they can be on the Web. + Follow Jeff on Twitter and subscribe to Perishable Press for quality web-design content delivered fresh.

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