Charset Playground

For this purpose I have created a couple of tables (one table for those codes where 128-159 are assigned to control characters, such as all of the iso-8859-x codes, and one table for those codes which use the range 128-159 for additional displayable codes). For additional clarity, based on user suggestions, I re-organised these tables, relative to the ones that I had used for the earlier browser tests.

By means of aliases set up on the server, one or other of these tables can be served out with any suitable charset parameter that's required. Unless you are properly briefed as to what you are seeing, however, these tables can be quite confusing, so do, please, check the following notes, and be sure you're comfortable with the issues explored in the other articles in this area.

As a matter of policy I have suppressed all display of numerical character references in the range 128-159. I am well aware that the popular browsers will usually display something when offered such a numerical character reference, and even that they are generated freely by software that comes from e.g Microsoft, but the effect is not defined in standard HTML, and I'm doing all I can to avoid any suggestion that you might use these technically undefined constructs.

In column 4 will be displayed the 8-bit character: this should therefore display as whatever displayable character is assigned to that code position in the charset code. Because I'm using the same table for every code, there are no explanations here of what those displayed characters should be - please refer to appropriate resources elsewhere: for example, the Cross-Mapping Tables at Unicode.org. I caution you strongly not to simply assume that what you see on your own browser is correct, there are just too many wrongly implemented (or wrongly configured) browsers out there!! The only descriptions that you see in the tables are those relating to the Latin-1 repertoire, not to the particular charset (external character encoding) that is under review.

In columns 5 and 6 will be displayed (for the range 160-255) the numerical character reference and the named entity respectively. According to the specifications, the browser should be displaying the appropriate Latin-1 characters in these positions, i.e those characters described by the entity name (in col. 7) and description (in col 8).

Here now are the various links to these tables: feel free to view them with


|Previous|Up|Next | |RagBag|About the author||