Character Entity Chart

January 28, 2003 9:10 PM

Ever wondered how the smart people create those weird ♥ √ ⊄ ⊗ characters on MeFi and in other places? Wonder no more. Brought to you via MeFi's own riffola, who has a simplified version of his own.
posted by dg (62 comments total)

Yikes it's not original, I just added HEX codes as per this comment. I tweaked it for personal use.
posted by riffola at 9:17 PM on January 28, 2003

Many thanks, dg and riffola. Most useful MeFi post in quite some time.
posted by languagehat at 9:25 PM on January 28, 2003

matts gonna love this.
posted by quonsar at 9:27 PM on January 28, 2003

?????
posted by zerofoks at 9:55 PM on January 28, 2003

? ? ? ? ?

(if question marks show up another time instead of hearts, even though they appeared in preview, i am giving up)
posted by zerofoks at 9:56 PM on January 28, 2003

I believe that one of the tricks specific to MeFi is that you have to replace the characters in the text input screen with the &whatever; after previewing. That way, you get ♥ instead of ?.
posted by dg at 10:00 PM on January 28, 2003

∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴

(weee!)
posted by cinderful at 10:01 PM on January 28, 2003

Okay, one more try:

&whatever;&whatever;&whatever;&whatever;&whatever;

PS: If only "whatevers" appear, dg tricked me. :p
posted by zerofoks at 10:05 PM on January 28, 2003

i knew it. nobody loves me.
posted by zerofoks at 10:06 PM on January 28, 2003

私はガラスを食べられます。それは私を傷つけません。
posted by bobo123 at 10:09 PM on January 28, 2003

dude, it's all boxes and question marks to me.
posted by jessamyn at 10:14 PM on January 28, 2003

Yeah, the only characters I can see are hearts and "hooks". Maybe it's my browser (IE 5.5)?
posted by zerofoks at 10:17 PM on January 28, 2003

Why doesn't my feminine ordinal indicator work (he says sheepishly...)
posted by Big_B at 10:25 PM on January 28, 2003

I like this one.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:29 PM on January 28, 2003

Œ
posted by bitdamaged at 10:38 PM on January 28, 2003

Nicely done, bobo, but what does it mean? (I've been curious what other systems can read non-western character sets. Besides OS X 10.2.whatever.)

I never knew that this † was a "dagger".
posted by Dick Paris at 10:39 PM on January 28, 2003

Does everyone see that okay? (should be like a backwards D connected to an E

I just pasted from the windows charcter map (start>>programs>>accessories>>system tools)

Been doing it that way for ages. and it didn't seem to need the "after post" deal since it's not using HTML entities but the actual character
posted by bitdamaged at 10:40 PM on January 28, 2003

jovino's won't validate because  through Ÿ are illegal (Windows specific). Although I do prefer jovino's format, I linked to it in the comment I linked to above. I just copied the evolt charts and added the Hex values from jovino's. The one I created was for personal use, I pointed to it earlier tonight to explain why &153; should not be used.
posted by riffola at 10:41 PM on January 28, 2003

Paris, see here. And this isn't directed at anyone, I just wished I could do this on slashdot.

凸(｀.´)
posted by bobo123 at 11:02 PM on January 28, 2003

Even if the page specifies a one-byte character set like ISO Latin 1, you can usually still use any arbitrary character from Unicode. Just remember to convert it from hex to decimal first!

Here is the trademark symbol: ™ (written as ™)

And here is Unicode's "snowman" symbol: ☃ (written as ☃)

That last one may not show up in all browsers, though. IE and Mozilla on the Mac can't handle it, but Safari and OmniWeb do.
posted by Potsy at 11:06 PM on January 28, 2003

boxes and more boxes??
posted by hama7 at 11:19 PM on January 28, 2003

There is another good page I often reference here.
posted by sixdifferentways at 11:21 PM on January 28, 2003

? ????? Metafilter ??? ?????. ???? ?????? ?????? ???? ?????? ??????????? ?????? ??? ????????? ???????? ? ????? ??????(?????????).
posted by camworld at 11:27 PM on January 28, 2003

Dang, Cyrillic worked in preview mode.
posted by camworld at 11:28 PM on January 28, 2003

You can add those entities as handy browser side-panels if you have Opera or Netscape (courtesy of Tim Luoma's Sidebar page).
posted by rowell at 11:29 PM on January 28, 2003

?T?
posted by stbalbach at 11:51 PM on January 28, 2003

→Θ←
posted by stbalbach at 11:54 PM on January 28, 2003

Tip: you can refer to these by character entity ( ) or numeric entity ( ). Character entities are easier for people to understand (nbsp=non-breaking space), but some older browsers (Netscape 4, I'm looking in your direction) work better with the numeric entities.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:08 AM on January 29, 2003

Korean also works in preview (using the MS IME for input), but not upon posting, we discovered in some MeTa thread not long ago (that I'm too lazy to search for at the moment).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:15 AM on January 29, 2003

???????????
posted by planetkyoto at 1:17 AM on January 29, 2003

Dick, bobo says: "I can eat glass. It doesn't injure me."
posted by planetkyoto at 1:22 AM on January 29, 2003

That's PK. That Bobo is really something! But please, Bobo, it's either Dick or Mr. Paris -- I have a hundred alternatives if you need one. I do want to avoid confusion with another Paris who haunts these parts.

So if I undertsand all of this correctly then, the non-Roman character sets will display properly as long as I have the font on my system and my browser does not choke on the hexi-whatever? Where can I get the font for Old Irish? I feel like I'm missing out. I guess I am confusing the coding of certain characters issue with what I thought was the miraculous display of Japanese characters when I was on a recent Safari™. I'll just crawl back under my rock though now, this stuff is way out fo my league.
posted by Dick Paris at 2:31 AM on January 29, 2003

"That's?" WTF? Gastro illness and lack of sleep taking toll.

Thanks, PK.
posted by Dick Paris at 2:32 AM on January 29, 2003

Can't resist the temptation... ?
ooh it worked! thanks riffola and dg.
posted by Tarrama at 3:18 AM on January 29, 2003

aww no it didn't. sigh
posted by Tarrama at 3:19 AM on January 29, 2003

Who's using ASCII any more? Going through these Unicode character charts is great fun. My favourite character in the world is 0F12 (next to 262D of course). Unicode is the future, comrades.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:50 AM on January 29, 2003

thank you! ♥
posted by madamjujujive at 4:08 AM on January 29, 2003

?!!! ? mmm ?
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:41 AM on January 29, 2003

oh bloody hell im not doin that again !
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:42 AM on January 29, 2003

You folks that are having trouble, here's how it works:

You type your code, like, for example:

™

Then you must preview before you can post.

BUT, when you preview, the character code you typed in turns into the symbol you want. For example: ™ .

You must then DELETE THE SYMBOL AND REPLACE IT WITH THE CODE AGAIN, THEN POST THE COMMENT.

Yeah, that threw me the first few times, too.
posted by Shane at 5:49 AM on January 29, 2003

Got it, SΔrge?
posted by Shane at 5:53 AM on January 29, 2003

and I just spent valuable time trying to determine how to get Greek characters. I knew I should've just read MeFi.

Thanks for the help Riffola and dg.
posted by DBAPaul at 6:24 AM on January 29, 2003

excellent™
posted by anathema at 6:48 AM on January 29, 2003

♥♥♥♥♥

yay
posted by zerofoks at 8:04 AM on January 29, 2003

Curse you dg and riffola for the curse you've released upon future MeFi threads.
posted by KnitWit at 8:23 AM on January 29, 2003

∫ Οω∩ ¥Φμ Μξ†æ h∴x°rš
posted by pedantic at 8:40 AM on January 29, 2003

Where can I get the font for Old Irish?

That would be hip. You know, this whole silent "gh" thing in English came about as a replacement for aspiration, or a "dot" above a letter. Not to mention old script G's and D's and A's and such are really cool.

Somehow I doubt there are characters for them.
-------------
§µÀ¬£
(the post-er formerly known as Shane)
posted by Shane at 8:46 AM on January 29, 2003

♠es♠ing
posted by yhbc at 8:53 AM on January 29, 2003

I ♠ my dog
posted by yhbc at 8:54 AM on January 29, 2003

?

(Should I or someone else start a MetaTalk thread devoted to nothing but messing around with Unicode?)
posted by wanderingmind at 9:02 AM on January 29, 2003

...Okay, I've put a thread up on MetaTalk. Go mess around there (until such time as it's deleted, but I figured I was long overdue to post something inane enough to be rejected.)
posted by wanderingmind at 9:23 AM on January 29, 2003

뉴 욕 타 임 즈 없 어 요
posted by eddydamascene at 11:28 AM on January 29, 2003

♥
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:45 PM on January 29, 2003

you ? your dog
posted by eddydamascene at 2:08 PM on January 29, 2003

you ♣ your dog
posted by eddydamascene at 2:09 PM on January 29, 2003

You must then DELETE THE SYMBOL AND REPLACE IT WITH THE CODE AGAIN, THEN POST THE COMMENT.

Not always. This is a very weird thing, and it's been plaguing me for years. As near as I can figure, if the text in the entry area contains any HTML tags before the special character, the special-character code will be preserved as such. If there are no HTML tags, the code will be converted to its literal character representation, and you'll have to enter the code again.

No idea why, but I've seen it happen across many different browsers and versions and platforms, and if anyone can explain why the hell this should be so, please tell me.
posted by staggernation at 4:11 PM on January 29, 2003

Here goes. ♥
posted by Tarrama at 5:18 PM on January 29, 2003

I ♥ Shane. Thank you.
posted by Tarrama at 5:19 PM on January 29, 2003

I can make the goose on my HP 41C fly backwards
posted by skyscraper at 6:58 PM on January 29, 2003

It depends on the computer you are at as well. Now that I am home, I don't see the "spade" symbols I put up in my test posts above - just little boxes.

Um, I didn't make the test posts from work, though. I went to a friend's computer during lunch.
posted by yhbc at 7:01 PM on January 29, 2003

If there are no HTML tags, the code will be converted to its literal character representation, and you'll have to enter the code again.

That's a sharp observation, stagger.

I ♥ Shane.

Someone in Tasmania ♥ me--how cool! Kind of like those license plates that say "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania," only much better! Must brag to friends...
posted by Shane at 6:25 AM on January 30, 2003

echo

echo

echo

posted by elwoodwiles at 11:41 AM on January 30, 2003