Detect browser character support in javascript?

Question

I\'m working on a music related website, and frequently use the HTML special characters for sharps (♯) and flats(♭) to keep things pretty, e.g.:

♯
         


        

Answer 1

"Browser support" is not the problem here. You should be serving your files as UTF-8*, and use the appropriate characters rather than the HTML entities.

• Unicode sharp symbol: ♯ (U+266F)
• Unicode flat symbol: ♭ (U+266D)

You should also make sure to save your files in UTF-8 (and not, say, ASCII or ISO-8859-1).

See also: the must-be-mentioned Joel on Software: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

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*I'm not a Rails guy, but I think it does this by default.