Character test for Web browsers

This document is a simple page for testing Web browsers as regards to support to characters beyond the ASCII character repertoire. Both character entities (&entityname; as defined in HTML 4.0) and character references (&#bignumber;) are tested.

Only a few sample characters are tested, picking up e.g. just one of the Greek characters, to make it easier to get the big picture of support in a browser. All the characters tested here belong to the set of characters for which there is an entity defined in HTML 4.0.

In the following table, the first column shows a character entity as it might be used in HTML; the second one shows what actually happens on your browser when that entity is used; the third and fourth one show what happens when a character reference &#n; (n in decimal) or &#xm; (m in hexadecimal) is used; naturally, columns 2, 3, 4 should display the same character; the next column gives a verbal description of the character.

© © © © copyright symbol, letter C in a circle
ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ letter y with dieresis (two dots above)
Γ Γ Γ Γ Greek capital letter gamma
• bullet (small black circle)
™ trademark sign (small TM raised)
∞ infinity symbol
♥ black heart suit (valentine)
— m dash (resembles hyphen -, but longer and perhaps thinner)
€ euro sign (symbol for the EMU currency)

Date of last update: 2000-04-14

Jukka Korpela,