ANSI Character Code Generator

In the upper portion (character convert) of the character code generator you select a character and the program outputs (from left to right):

• The ANSI code in decimal
• The HTML representation of the character code
• The ANSI code in hexadecimal
• The Javascript representation of the character code

Some characters will cause problems within an html document. For example to display a 'less than symbol' (<) within a web page you must enter &#60; or &lt; otherwise the browser will treat this as the opening tag of some HTML markup and hide everything up to the next 'greater than' (>) symbol. Some other characters that can cause problems include quotes ("), copyright (©), registered trademark (®), along with lots of strange characters like ø,Û,±,µ,æ,ÿ etc that are rather difficult to enter from the keyboard.

In the lower portion (phrase convert) you enter an entire phrase ('Hello Mum' in the example above) and the output boxes contain the phrase converted into HTML and Javascript ANSI code representations of the phrase.

If you use a mixture of HTML and Javascript ANSI code representations within my mailme() script, both styles will work and it becomes even more difficult for s-p-a-m bots to harvest your email address. It has been suggested to me that using ANSI representations of the characters of your email address for a noscript version ought to do the same job. But I wouldn't want to rely on this. Displaying a graphic of the email address is much safer because these codes are easy to convert! (See also: Word count statistics)