Special Characters Cheat Sheet
February 26th, 2008 by 
Adrian Parr
I quite often find myself needing to find codes for special characters and then having to track down a website that lists the type of code I am after. Sometimes I need Unicode, other times I need ASCII, and other time I need URL Encoded values. Things like a list of key codes and escape sequences are also handy to have. So, to make mine (and your) life easier, I have put together a Special Characters Cheat Sheet (PDF) that lists all the characters from 0 - 255 (ASCII) and their other corresponding code values.
You can download the Special Characters Cheat Sheet (PDF) here
Here are some useful links to the Adobe Flash LiveDocs
- Keyboard Keys and Key Code Values on Adobe LiveDocs
- URL Encoding: Reading special characters from a text file
Here is a little Flash 8 (AS2) movie that displays charCodeAt, escape, getCode, getAscii and Key.CONST
In AS3 there are a few more event properties we can access such as ctrlKey, shiftKey and altKey. There are also many more static constants which are mapped to certain keys on the keyboard. Here is the Flash 9 AS3 version of the above movie.
UPDATE 20/03/09: Lee Brimlow has just made me aware of a useful online tool for converting between Unicode and other representations such as Hex, CSS Escape Sequences and Percent Encoding for URIs. The tool is called Unicode Code Converter v6 and has been written by Richard Ishida.
Posted in ActionScript 3.0, Actionscript 1.0 & 2.0, Flash, HTML | 
January 27th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Hi adrian, i have a question it is more to do with actually the typing, how would one type an escape code?
also i have a keylistener, and i am not using a textfield, i am attaching separate movieclips, and asigned key.getAscii() to the movieclip (which has a textfield inside) what i want to know is for special characters like accentuated a/e/i/o/u and other special characters, is this possible with getascii? and if not, do i have to have an input text field where text is typed?
thanks in advance
March 20th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
@Clarklin: To type a special character using your keyboard you can do the following …
On a Windows PC
Hold down the Alt key and then type in the Alt Code for the character you want using the number pad on your keyboard. For example, the Alt Code for an equals sign (=) is Alt+0061.
On a Mac
The method mentioned above should work, but hold down Option instead of Alt. If that doesn’t work, you should be able to get the character you require by opening the Character Palette (Edit > Character Palette).
This link may help if you are on a Mac …
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7885801