Use Diacritics in HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Click a character to copy it. Use Details for its technical record.

Keep source files and documents in UTF-8 when writing literal Unicode. Escapes identify encoded values; they do not choose a font or establish a language's orthography.

One sequence in three syntaxes

The decomposed sequence below is e followed by U+0301. Numeric character references in HTML are decoded into text. A JavaScript code-point escape constructs the corresponding scalar. A CSS hexadecimal escape ends with optional whitespace when needed to separate following hex digits.

HTML text

é

JavaScript string literal

"\u{65}\u{301}"

CSS string content

"\000065\000301"

Supplementary values need full scalar handling: U+1E944 is represented by JavaScript \u{1E944}. A four-digit escape cannot encode that scalar by itself. Clipboard text must contain the selected string rather than the source-code escape spelling.

Escapes are context-specific. Use DOM textContent or value for untrusted text; do not insert it as executable HTML. Normalize only when your application explicitly needs that transformation.

Syntax sources: HTML character references, ECMAScript string literals, CSS escapes.

Inspect escapes and encodings · Normalization choices · Typing methods