Question

I need to display a visual cue along with a user’s name to indicate that the user is an administrator (e.g. a SO moderator’s username has a diamond next to it). I searched for “administrator icon” on Google for some inspiration and decided to display a “shield” character (the one you see in Windows 7 to indicate that the action requires administrator privileges).

I do not plan to use images. Is there an ASCII/Unicode character for this?

Answer 1

I checked the Notepad++ character panel, and the closest to a shield I found was this: ø (ASCII code 248), or in a bigger version: Ø (ASCII code 216). Other than that, I found several designs that include multiple ASCII characters, such as:

http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/s/shield.txt

http://www.geocities.com/spunk1111/mythical.htm#shield2

http://www.retrojunkie.com/asciiart/weapons/shields.txt

But I guess those won’t be very useful to you. That was my best take at it. Anyway you can check a full ASCII reference at http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

EDIT: I found a unicode symbol that you might like: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26e8/index.htm