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Free Plugin by Scott Reilly v2.2

HTML Special Characters Helper

Admin widget on the Add/Edit Post pages for inserting HTML encodings of special characters into the post.

HTML Special Characters Helper

The facts

Rating
5★ from 3
Active installs
200+
Price
Free
Last updated
22 Feb 2017
Added
Jul 2009
Requires WP
4.6
Tested up to
WP 4.7.35
Downloads
38,389

Our analysis

AI-assisted

HTML Special Characters Helper is a WordPress plugin that adds an admin widget for inserting HTML special characters into posts and pages. When you click a character in the widget, its character encoding is inserted at the cursor location in the post body text field. The plugin is designed primarily for users who work in HTML mode rather than the visual editor, which has its own special characters helper.

Best for: This plugin suits users who frequently work in HTML mode and need to insert special characters easily.

What it does well

  • Adds a widget for easy insertion of special characters
  • Shows HTML entity encoding and character names on hover
  • Allows for customisation through filters

Where it falls short

  • Last updated in February 2017
  • May be unnecessary for users of the visual editor

Verdict

HTML Special Characters Helper provides a straightforward solution for inserting special characters in HTML mode, but its age and limited updates may be a concern for some users.

From the developer

Scott Reilly's own description of HTML Special Characters Helper, lightly tidied.

Add an admin widget labeled “HTML Special Characters” that is present in the admin Add/Edit Post and Add/Edit Page pages. Clicking on any special character in the widget causes its character encoding to be inserted into the post body text field at the current cursor location (or at the end of the post if the cursor isn’t located in the post body field). Hovering over any of the special characters in the admin widget causes hover text to appear that shows the HTML entity encoding for the character as well as the name of the character.

Note that when used in the visual editor mode the special character itself is added to the post body. Also note that the visual editor has its own special characters popup helper accessible via the advanced toolbar, which depending on your usage, may make this plugin unnecessary for you. In truth, the plugin is intended more for the non-visual (aka HTML) mode as that is the mode I (the plugin author) use.

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | Author Homepage

Filters

The plugin exposes two filters for hooking. Typically, code making use of filters should ideally be put into a mu-plugin or site-specific plugin (which is beyond the scope of this readme to explain).

c2c_html_special_characters (filter)

The ‘c2c_html_special_characters’ hook allows you to remove existing characters or entire groups of characters, and/or add new characters or groups of characters.

Arguments:

  • $codes (array) : An association array in which the keys are a grouping name and the values are associative arrays themselves with the code as the key and the human-friendly descriptions as the values.

Example:

/**
 * Add a new grouping of characters (accented 'A's).
 *
 * @param array $characters Default HTML special characters.
 * @return array
 */
function more_html_special_characters( $characters ) {
    $characters['accented_a'] = array(
        'name'     => 'Accented A',
        'À' => 'A grave accent',
        'Á' => 'A accute accent',
        'Â'  => 'A circumflex',
        'Ã' => 'A tilde',
        'Ä'   => 'A umlaut',
        'Å'  => 'A ring',
        'Æ'  => 'AE ligature',
    );
    return $characters; // Important!
}
add_filter( 'c2c_html_special_characters', 'more_html_special_characters' );

c2c_html_special_characters_post_type (filter)

The ‘c2c_html_special_characters_post_type’ hook allows you to specify which post_types for which the HTML Special Characters metabox should be shown.

Arguments:

  • $post_types (array) : An array of post types. By default, this value is array( 'page', 'post' )

Example:

Read the full description on the official page →

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