Java Servlet Programming

Appendix D. Character Entities

Table 4.1 lists the various Unicode escapes, HTML numeric entities, and HTML named entities for all printable ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) characters.

The numeric and named entities may be used within HTML pages; they are converted to symbols by web browsers. Unicode escapes may be used within servlet code; they are interpreted by the Java compiler. For example, a pound sign (£) can be embedded in an HTML page as "£" or "£". It can be embedded directly in Java code as "\u00A3".

Not every HTML character entity is universally supported. The Support column indicates its level of support. An “S” value means the numeric and named entity values for the symbol are part of the HTML standard. A “P” indicates the entity values are proposed standards—not part of the HTML standard but in most cases widely supported. An “N” in the column indicates the entity values are nonstandard and poorly supported. For these symbols, it’s often best to use Unicode escapes.

Table D-1. Character Entities

Unicode Escape	Numeric Entity	Named Entity	Symbol	Description	Support
\u0009				\t	Horizontal tab	S
\u000A	
		\n	Line feed	S
\u000D	
		\r	Carriage return	S
\u0020	 			Space	S
\u0021	!		!	Exclamation point	S
\u0022	"	"	"	Quotation mark	S
\u0023	#		#	Hash mark	S
\u0024	$		$	Dollar sign	S
\u0025	%		%	Percent sign	S
\u0026 ...