ISO Latin-1 Characters

Languages based on Roman characters use accent marks, dieresis or other methods in the spelling of words so they may be pronounced properly. HTML uses an international standard [ISO-8859-1] which incorporates the ASCII character set to represent these special characters. This character set also includes characters not normally found on keyboards, but which are used everyday such as the divide sign, ÷. Like the escape sequence characters of the previous page, the majority of these Roman characters have a logical name (< > & ").

All characters in the ISO Latin-1 character set have a numeric representation ranging from 0 to 255. To properly represent these characters in HTML use the following escape sequence. Start with an ampersand, &, immediately followed by a number sign, #, then a number from 0 to 255, and end with a semicolon. For example, small c with a cedilla can be written as ç or as ç. Note that the numeric representation has a # after the &.

Be sure to end the sequence with a semicolon, because if you do not you will not get the desired result. An small c with a cedilla written in HTML without the semicolon will look like this &ccedil. An small c with a cedilla properly written in HTML with the semicolon at the end will look like this ç

A table of the ISO Latin-1 Character Set is provided here. You may choose to study the table of the ISO Latin-1 Character Set, or go straight to the exercise.