Unicode Character Equivalence Support in Web Browsers

Xah Lee, 2011-03-09

It's very nice, in Google Chrome and Safari, that if you type 3 dots ... in the find box 【Ctrl+f】, it'll find the Unicode character ellipsis …. Here's some other equivalences:

e ⟺ é
a ⟺ à
i ⟺ î
n ⟺ ñ
u ⟺ ü
others accented letters e.g. ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆ Ç ÈÉÊË ÌÍÎÏ ÐÑ ÒÓÔÕÖ ØÙÚÛÜÝÞß àáâãäåæç èéêë ìíîï ðñòóôõö øùúûüýþÿ
"straight double quote" ⟺ “curly double quote”
1 ⟺ ①
2 ⟺ ②
3 ⟺ ③
... ⟺ …
any char is equivalent to its fullwidth version. e.g. () [] {} vs （）［］｛｝, and fullwidth forms of punctuations “, . ; ? !” etc. (See: Unicode Full-Width Characters.)

I think some of these are based on Unicode equivalence but not all.

Note: Firefox, Opera, does not support this. It's funny that IE8 support some of them. If you type “1”, it'll find “①”, but if you type “e”, it won't find “é”. (all browsers tested are latest public versions as of 2011-03-09.) You can test by 【Ctrl+f】 right on this page.

✍