Do I need to use ascii codes for french accents in a html page? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

Should all accented characters use html entities? (3 answers)

Closed 9 years ago.

1. société
2. société

Which among the two should be used in html page and why? Can anyone please let me know the importance of it??

Answer 1

If your source file is correctly encoded as UTF-8, you can simple write "société". Basicly you can use any character you would ever want, when you use UTF-8 encoding.

But, if you for some reason don't use UTF-8, but use for instance ASCII encoding, you are forced to write é This is a very good reason to check you are using UTF-8 encoding in all your source files.

Where you need to use html entities is for instance:

• & which is written &
• < which is written &lt;
• > which is written &gt;

But remember it depends on, where in the html code. In attribute values, you also need to replace:

• " with &quot;

This is what I remember of the top of my head. But use a html validator, it will tell you, if you have problems of this kind.

Answer 2

No, you can (and should) use UTF-8 encoding.

Answer 3

Escapes are for text that gets parsed or processed somehow. Escape characters or numeric character references (NCRs) prevent text from getting confused with a symbol that the interpreter/compiler/etc might take as a syntactical instruction.

If you want some official documentation for when to use NCRs:

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes