HTML Charsets

The web browser displays the alphabets, numbers and some other symbols correctly. This is all possible because of the required character set that web browser uses. The character set or character encoding has different character encoding standards which assign some numbers to these character set which can be used in the internet. 

ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ANSII) created this character encoding. This character encoding are used in C/C++ programming. It has 128 alphanumeric characters consisting of alphabets(A-Z) and (a-z) and some special symbols like + – * / ( ) @ etc.

ANSI(Windows-1252): American National Standards Institute (ANSI) created character encoding supported 256 characters. It is used as default character set in Microsoft Windows. 

ISO-8859-1: It is used as default character set of HTML4 and also supports 256 characters. The International Standards Organization (ISO) defines the standard character sets for different alphabets/languages. It contains numbers, upper and lowercase English letters, and some special characters. 

UTF-8: UTF-8 and UTF-16 standards was developed by Unicode Consortium, because the ISO-8859 character-sets are limited, and not compatible a multilingual environment. It consists all the character and punctuation symbols. 

Attribute: Web browser must know the character encoding standard used in the html page and this we do as given below. 

Examples:

HTML4

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">

HTML5

<meta charset="UTF-8">

NOTE: The first values from 0 to 127 are considered as the "Standard" ASCII character set.
      Characters with values from 128 to 255 are the "Extended" Character set.

Character set for different character encoding standard: Following list shows different character encoding standards with their characters and their assigned number codes. 

Table 1(ASCII Device Control Characters): This table contains Characters which are designed to control hardware devices.These are also known as control characters.

NUMBER	CHARACTER	DESCRIPTION
00	NUL	null character
01	SOH	start of header
02	STX	start of text
03	ETX	end of text
04	EOT	end of transmission
05	ENQ	enquiry
06	ACK	acknowledge
07	BEL	bell(ring)
08	BS	backspace
09	HT	horizontal tab
10	LF	line feed
11	VT	vertical tab
12	FF	form feed
13	CR	carriage return
14	SO	shift out
15	SI	shift in
16	DLE	data link escape
17	DC1	device contyrol 1
18	DC2	device contyrol 2
19	DC3	device contyrol 3
20	DC4	device contyrol 4
21	NAK	negative acknowledge
22	SYN	synchronize
23	ETB	end transmission block
24	CAN	cancel
25	EM	end of medium
26	SUB	substitute
27	ESC	escape
28	FS	file separator
29	GS	group separator
30	RS	record separator
31	US	unit separator
127	DEL	delete

Table 2: This table contains characters having the same numbers assigned in different character encoding.

NUMBER	CHARACTER	DESCRIPTION
32		Space
33	!	Exclamation Mark
34	“	Quotation Mark
35	#	Hash Sign
36	$	Dollar Sign
37	%	Percent Sign
38	&	Ampersand Sign
39	‘	Apostrophe Sign
40	(	Opening Paranthesis
41	)	Closing Parenthesis
42	*	Asterisk Sign
43	+	Plus Sign
44	,	Comma
45	–	Hyphen/minus Sign
46	.	Full-stop
47	/	Slash/Divide Sign
48	0	Number Zero
49	1	Number One
50	2	Number Two
51	3	Number Three
52	4	Number Four
53	5	Number Five
54	6	Number Six
55	7	Number Seven
56	8	Number Eight
57	9	Number Nine
58	:	Colon
59	;	Semicolon
60	<	Lessthan Sign
61	=	Equalto Sign
62	>	Greaterthan Sign
63	?	Question Mark
64	@	at Sign
65	A	Letter A
66	B	Letter B
67	C	Letter C
68	D	Letter D
69	E	Letter E
70	F	Letter F
71	G	Letter G
72	H	Letter H
73	I	Letter I
74	J	Letter J
75	K	Letter K
76	L	Letter L
77	M	Letter M
78	N	Letter N
79	O	Letter O
80	P	Letter P
81	Q	Letter Q
82	R	Letter R
83	S	Letter S
84	T	Letter T
85	U	Letter U
86	V	Letter V
87	W	Letter W
88	X	Letter X
89	Y	Letter Y
90	Z	Letter Z
91	[	Opening Square Bracket
92	\	Backslash
93	]	Closing Square Bracket
94	^	Circumflex Accent
95	_	Low Line
96	`	Grave Accent
97	a	Letter a
98	b	Letter b
99	c	Letter c
100	d	Letter d
101	e	Letter e
102	f	Letter f
103	g	Letter g
104	h	Letter h
105	i	Letter i
106	j	Letter j
107	k	Letter k
108	l	Letter l
109	m	Letter m
110	n	Letter n
111	o	Letter o
112	p	Letter p
113	q	Letter q
114	r	Letter r
115	s	Letter s
116	t	Letter t
117	u	Letter u
118	v	Letter v
119	w	Letter w
120	x	Letter x
121	y	Letter y
122	z	Letter z
123	{	Opening Curly Bracket
124	|	Vertical Line
125	}	Closing Curly Bracket
126	~	Tilde
127	DEL	delete

Table 3: This table contains character having different character encoding.

NUMBER	DESCRIPTION
128	€
129	not used
130	‚
131	ƒ
132	„
133	…
134	†
135	‡
136	ˆ
137	‰
138	Š
139	‹
140	Œ
141	Not Used
142	Ž
143	Not Used
144	Not Used
145	‘
146	’
147	“
148	”
149	•
150	–
151	—
152	˜
153	™
154	š
155	›
156	œ
157	Not Used
158	ž
159	Ÿ
160	no-break Space
161	¡
162	¢
163	£
164	¤
165	¥
166	¦
167	§
168	¨
169	©
170	ª
171	«
172	¬
173	­�
174	®
175	¯
176	°
177	±
178	²
179	³
180	´
181	µ
182	¶
183	·
184	¸
185	¹
186	º
187	»
188	¼
189	½
190	¾
191	¿
192	À
193	Á
194	Â
195	Ã
196	Ä
197	Å
198	Æ
199	Ç
200	È
201	É
202	Ê
203	Ë
204	Ì
205	Í
206	Î
207	Ï
208	Ð
209	Ñ
210	Ò
211	Ó
212	Ô
213	Õ
214	Ö
215	×
216	Ø
217	Ù
218	Ú
219	Û
220	Ü
221	Ý
222	Þ
223	ß
224	à
225	á
226	â
227	ã
228	ä
229	å
230	æ
231	ç
232	è
233	é
234	ê
235	ë
236	ì
237	í
238	î
239	ï
240	ð
241	ñ
242	ò
243	ó
244	ô
245	õ
246	ö
247	÷
248	ø
249	ù
250	ú
251	û
252	ü
253	ý
254	þ
255	ÿ