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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 128 | € |
| 129 | not used |
| 130 | ‚ |
| 131 | ƒ |
| 132 | „ |
| 133 | … |
| 134 | † |
| 135 | ‡ |
| 136 | ˆ |
| 137 | ‰ |
| 138 | Š |
| 139 | ‹ |
| 140 | Π|
| 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 |