Question

I am trying to show up some HTML Special Chars like ☚ and I want that, when click it, it will display it’s code on a textarea.

I am trying something like this:

insertHTMLCode = function(code){
    var currentText = document.getElementById("textBox"); 
    var codeWithPadding = " " + code + " "; 

    currentText.value += codeWithPadding;
    currentText.focus(); 
}

However it always gets the symbol itself on the textarea instead the code (like &#9658)?

Answer 1

You can use charCodeAt to get the numeric value of a character, and from there, you can generate the entity code:

var codeWithPadding = ' &#' + code.charCodeAt(0).toString(10) + '; ';