HTML Entity Character Lookup is a great little free webapp which looks up HTML entities for characters (funny that). Just type in the character and the entities are displayed. There’s a Dashboard widget version too, which is super-handy.
In fact it’s better than that, you don’t even have to type in the exact character. To save you heading over to the character palette, just type in something similar, for example a * gives you bullet-like characters, a > gives you arrow-like characters, and an A will show accented capital A’s. Clever stuff.
Another great piece of free software I use for this sort of thing is Unicode Font Info, which I wrote about a few years ago. And speaking of Unicode – that is the best way to deal with special characters, so that the characters are embedded directly in the HTML (or database or wherever) and entities are not required.
Comments
1
By a Brighton local too! Remy released this on BNM a few days ago, I loved it immediately!
Does anyone know of a Windows equivalent to the Unicode Font Info tool?
Cheers,
James
2
I’ve found the Unicode Font Info tool to be incredibly useful in the weeks since SXSWi, now that I encode my quotes correctly following your talk. Thanks for showing me it :-)
3
Excellent – I saw this a few days ago, but hadn’t noticed there was a Dashboard widget too. Sits nicely beside my jQuery widget. :)
4
Thanks for this hint. Because I don’t have to search huge tables on selfhtml anymore, I save a lot of time in webdesign now.
5
Thanks for the good work, saved me a lot of “lookups” while doing the redesign of our legal weblog.
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