slayeroffice - web experiments gone horribly awry

02.23.2006 - Unicode Lookup

Several folks have contacted me since publishing Alternatives to innerHTML asking how to create special characters with createTextNode.

If you were to use document.createTextNode("&"); you will literally get & written to the document rather than the ampersand you are looking for. The answer is to use the Unicode hex value for the character: document.createTextNode("\u0026");.

I wasn't able to turn up any reasonably useful charts of the codes, so to make this a bit easier I've thrown together a quick application that will do the lookup for you. Just type in the ASCII integer value or the character itself and it will present you with the Unicode hex value.

A good unicode page I found the other day... <a href="http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/reference/entity/index.php">http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/reference/entity/index.php</a>
Posted by Aaron Barker on February 23, 2006 @ 3:09 pm
Curses... foiled again. You need to put a note about HTML is not allowed in comments or something.

Here's a cleaner line to copy:

http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/reference/entity/index.php
Posted by Aaron Barker on February 23, 2006 @ 3:10 pm


See, thats the sort of chart I would have *liked* google to have turned up for me. Oh well...

"No HMTL Allowed" added ;)
Posted by Steve on February 23, 2006 @ 3:54 pm


Just as a note, the backslash before u in the Unicode character escape doesn't show up in Bloglines. I'm not sure whether that's your RSS feed or Bloglines doing it.
Posted by Stuart Langridge on February 24, 2006 @ 3:33 am
Thanks Stuart - fixed.
Posted by Steve on February 24, 2006 @ 10:07 am
For Mac users, Unicode Font Info [1] is a free tool which provides Unicode and HTML information and allows you to check out which glyphs are present in the fonts on your system. Very handy indeed.

1. http://pixel.recoil.org/cocoa/unicodefontinfo.html
Posted by Richard Rutter on February 25, 2006 @ 5:59 am


Cool page Arron and never noticed the change in Bloglines but way cool fo rStuart pointitng that out.
Posted by Britney on March 10, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
Thanks, been looking for this for AGES!! You're a life saver!!
Posted by Daniel on March 12, 2006 @ 4:59 pm

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