How should I encode special characters into web pages? For instance I need this symbol ?, which I used just by copying and pasting the character as I can see it now. This worked for the desktop browsers I checked with and also on iPad and iPhone but nothing is displayed on a Blackberry I used for testing. Is there a standard best practice for this?
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2103/browsertest.htm
The answer is
Try to replace it with °, and also to set the charset to utf-8, as Martin suggests.
°C will get you something like this:
If using Java-JSP, What worked for me is to paste below in JSP page
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
I'm not sure why this hasn't come up yet but why don't you use ℃ (?) or ℉ (?) for Celsius and Fahrenheit respectively!
Add a metatag to your header
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
This expands the amount of characters you can use.
If you really want to use the DEGREE CELSIUS character “?”, then copy and paste is OK, provided that your document is UTF-8 encoded and declared as such in HTTP headers. Using the character reference ℃ would work equally well, and would work independently of character encoding, but the source would be much less readable.
The problem with Blackberry is most probably a font issue. I don’t know about fonts on Blackberry, but the font repertoire might be limited. There’s nothing you can do about this in HTML, but you can use CSS, possibly with @font face.
But there is seldom any reason to use the DEGREE CELSIUS. It is a compatibility character, included in Unicode due to its use in East Asian writing. The Unicode Standard explicitly says in Chapter 15 (section 15.2, page 497):
“In normal use, it is better to represent degrees Celsius “°C” with a sequence of U+00B0 degree sign + U+0043 latin capital letter c, rather than U+2103 degree celsius.”
The degree sign “°” can be entered in many ways, including the entity reference `°, but normally it is best to insert it as a character, via copy and paste or otherwise. On Windows, you can use Alt 0176.
Caveat: Some browsers may treat the degree sign as allowing a line break after it even when no space intervenes, putting “°” and the following “C” on separate lines. There are different ways to prevent this. A simple and effective method is this: <nobr>42 °C</nobr>.
- The degree sign belongs to the number, and not to the "C". You can regard the degree sign as a number symbol, just like the minus sign.
- There shall not be any space between the digits and the degree sign.
- There shall be a non-breaking space between the degree sign and the "C".
Using sup on the letter "o" and a capital "C"
<sup>o</sup>CShould work in all browsers and IE6+
Source: Stackoverflow.com