Industry guru Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, Google AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Mp3 players, management, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft Windows.

SupportSpace: Immediate Live Tech Support. Free Assessment + $10 coupon!!

How do I include Foreign Currency Symbols in HTML?

Dave, I'm writing something where I need to place various currency symbols in an HTML file. (euros, yens, and pounds) Is it best to use names like ¥ or numbers like ¥? I presume just putting the raw text character in the file is bad.

Dave's Answer:

No question here: names are much better because they're portable, whereas a sequence like ¥ indexes character #165 in the ASCII table, which is going to be different on different platforms, and even within different typefaces.

I have an extensive reference page that offers an easy cheat-sheet for all the official character entities defined in HTML 4.01 too called HTML 4.01 Character Entities.

If you want to see the official reference for these character entities, pop over to W3.org and you'll see that you're good to go with ¥ and so on.

One more benefit: ¥ is a lot more readable too.

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Categorized: HTML and CSS (Article 3885)
Tagged:
Previous: Can I have a free Gmail account?
Next: How come I get lots of spam that isn't addressed to me?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

Rather amazingly, there are no comments on this article yet.

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!