Html converting special characters

HTML encoder/decoder

Use this online free HTML Encoder Tool to convert all the applicable characters to their corresponding HTML entities. The tool, also, allows you to decode the encoded characters and to convert the HTML code to JavaScript Unicode string.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document.

HTML has been in use since 1991, but HTML 4.0 was the first standardized version where international characters were given reasonably complete treatment. When an HTML document includes special characters outside the range of seven-bit ASCII, there are two aspects should be taken into consideration: the information’s integrity, and universal browser display. (Wikipedia)

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII is the most common character set or character encoding in use on computers and the most widely used character set for encoding text electronically. It was the first character encoding standard. 128 different characters are defined in it including English Letters, numbers and most common special characters. ASCII encoding supports only the upper- and lowercase Latin alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and some extra characters which make a total of 128 characters in all.

HTML Encoding means to convert the document that contains special characters outside the range of normal seven-bit ASCII into a standard form. The type of encoding used is sent to the server in the form of header information so that it can be easily and correctly parsed by the browsers.

Web encoding properly displays the text or string in the browsers. Whenever text is copied from a webpage, our browsers directly copy the decoded characters that could not be displayed in the browsers. Those ASCII characters must be encoded to properly display the output.

HTML character entity reference is a special set of characters (a code), which the browser displays as a special character or a symbol, corresponding to the entity reference code.

The general format of an HTML character entity reference is &, followed by some code, and then followed by; without any spaces in between.

The HTML Encoder tool allows you to encode and decode immediately.

HTML Encode

HTML character encoder converts all the ASCII characters to their HTML entities. Every character has a specific meaning and every converted entity code conveys the original message of that character.

An HTML entity is a piece of text («string») that begins with an ampersand (&) and ends with a semicolon (;). Entities are frequently used to display reserved characters (which would otherwise be interpreted as HTML code), and invisible characters (like non-breaking spaces). You can also use them in place of other characters that are difficult to type with a standard keyboard.

Another reason to use the HTML Encoder to quickly output special characters not readily available on our keyboards. One such character that is used quite often is the copyright symbol or ©. The character entity reference code for © is «©».

So, our HTML Encoder can help you to quickly convert the characters and get the equivalent HTML entities.

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HTML Entities Encoder / Decoder Encode and decode a piece of text to its HTML equivalent

The HTML character encoder converts all applicable characters to their corresponding HTML entities. Certain characters have special significance in HTML and should be converted to their correct HTML entities to preserve their meanings.
For example, it is not possible to use the < character as it is used in the HTML syntax to create and close tags. It must be converted to its corresponding < HTML entity to be displayed in the content of an HTML page. HTML entity names are case sensitive.

Reserved entities, symbols and characters in HTML

This table shows a list of reserved HTML entities with their associated character and description.

Code samples

Most programming languages provide a way to convert HTML entities to their associated character and vice-versa.

htmlentities (PHP 4, PHP 5)

Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities.

string htmlentities ( string $string [, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401 [, string $encoding = ini_get("default_charset") [, bool $double_encode = true ]]] )

This function is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except with htmlentities(), all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.
If you’re wanting to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().

HttpUtility.HtmlEncode Method (String) .NET Framework 4.6, 4.5, 4, 3.5, 3.0, 2.0, 1.1

Converts a string to an HTML-encoded string.

public static string HtmlEncode( string s )

HTML encoding converts characters that are not allowed in HTML into character-entity equivalents; HTML decoding reverses the encoding. For example, when embedded in a block of text, the characters < and >are encoded as < and > for HTTP transmission.

References and links of interest

Wikipedia: Character entity reference

In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD). The «replacement text» of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal Character Set/Unicode. The purpose of a character entity reference is to provide a way to refer to a character that is not universally encodable.

OpinionatedGeek HTML Encoder

Type or paste in the text you want to HTML encode, then press the «Encode» button, or read a brief explanation of the process of HTML encoding.

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How to convert special characters to HTML in Javascript?

We can use replace() method to convert special characters to HTML in JavaScript. This method can also be applied with a map. There are many other methods that can be used for this task. We will discuss these methods in detail in this article. We will start our discussion with the need to convert special characters to HTML then, we will talk about the methods of converting the special characters. Firstly, let’s talk about some concepts of characters, and then we will come up with our next topics.

Need to Convert Special Characters to HTML

We have seen our developers writing thousands of lines of code to achieve a particular task. Now, let’s suppose we need to use less than(<) or greater than(>) sign in our web-page or say mobile application that uses HTML as a scripting language. Then, it would become a problem as less than(<) and greater than(>) signs have special meaning to the scripting language HTML.

These signs are generally used to initialize a tag in HTML. Similarly, using a special character, either < or >within an attribute value might cause the attribute to be misinterpreted. Hence, to overcome this problem, we have special codes for every special character that exist while using HTML.To insert special characters in HTML, start with an ampersand (&), then a pound symbol (#), then the code number, and finish with a semicolon (;). For example, the (copyright) symbol can be represented by using ©.

Methods to Convert Special Characters to HTML

There are several ways to convert special characters to HTML. Some of the most common ways to do so are listed below.

Using the String.prototype.replace() Method

The String.prototype.replace() method in JavaScript is used to replace the special character with another value in the string.

String.prototype.replace() takes two parameters, first one is the value to be replaced, and the second parameter is the value to replace it within the string.

This method returns a new string with all the search values replaced with the desired value in the string. However, the String.prototype.replace() method does not change the value of the existing string. Let’s see an example.

Example

Using the String.prototype.replace() with a Map

The String.prototype.replace() method can also be used with a Map in JavaScript. Here also String.prototype.replace() takes two parameters, first one is the regular expression pattern to be replaced, and the second parameter is the matched substrings.

Example

Let’ see an example of using map with string.prototype.replace() −

Using the encodeURIComponent() Function

We can also use encodeURIComponent() Function in javascript to replace the special character with another value in the string. We generally use this function to encode a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) component.It replaces specific characters in a string with escaped counterparts to ensure that the string can be safely used in a URI.

Now, to use this function we simply pass the string (str) as a parameter in the function. This method also returns a new string with all the search values replaced with the desired value in the string. Like the String.prototype.replace() method this function also does not change the value of the existing string. Let’s see an example.

Example

While using this function one should keep in mind that it only works for a few special characters. To work with some other special characters, multiple methods or additional logic must be used to handle them.

Using the escape() Function

The escape() function like encodeURIcomponent() function is used to encode a string so that it does not cause any problem with the URL of the website. To use this function we simply pass the string (str) as a parameter in the function. This method also returns a new string with all the search values replaced with the desired value in the string.

Example

Here is the example of escape() function −

Conclusion

In this blog, we firstly started with the introduction of special characters, the need to convert them, and various methods that can be used to do so. Some of the discussed methods here are Using the String.prototype.replace(), Using the String.prototype.replace() with a Map, Using the encodeURIComponent() Function, and the escape() function. Some other methods that can be used are innerHTML, replace, document.createElement, etc.

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