Display the Greek Alphabet with VBScript
How to Use VBScript to Display Tables of Greek Letters on a Web Page
Jun 26, 2009
A web site designer will often wish to use Greek letters on their web pages. For example, they may want to display something like:
or:
If that's the case then they'll need to know some ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) codes, for example:
- θ = θ
- α = α
On the other hand, if they don't want to remember these codes (and the other 46 codes for all of the upper and lower case Greek letters) then they can just write some VBScript to display all of the Greek letters in a table.
The Greek Letters
The first step is to create an array containing the names of the Greek letters:
- "Alpha","Beta","Gamma","Delta", "Epsilon", "Zeta", _
- "Eta", "Theta", "Iota", "Kappa", "Lambda", "Mu", _
- "Nu", "Xi", "Omicron", "Pi", "Rho", "Sigma", _
- "Tau", "Upsilon", "Phi", "Chi", "Psi", "Omega")
The ASCII codes for the letters lie in two ranges:
- 913 to 936 = upper case Greek letters (from Α to Ψ)
- 945 to 968 = lower case Greek letters (from α to ψ)
And so with this knowledge, and the array of letter names, the developer can create the operating parameters of the VBScript functionality:
The programmer can now uses this information to create the required subroutines and functions.
A VBScript Subroutine for Displaying all of the Greek Letters in a Table
It's interesting to view all of the Greek letters in a table on a web page, and a programmer can achieve this easily with VBScript. The programmer must, therefore, add a suitably named subroutine and the local variables that it will require:
Next the table headings can be defined:
The code for displaying the Greek letters is quite simple. It:
- steps through the array of letters
- uses the current position to calculate the correct ASCII code for the upper case letter
- uses the ASCII code for the upper case letter to calculate the correct ASCII code for the lower case letter
And this code will be something like:
The subroutine itself is called by adding the code:
If this VBScript is added to a web page then a table containing all of the Greek letters (in both upper and lower case) and their ASCII codes will be displaying (as shown in figure 1 at the bottom of this article). Of course, any programmer's should now be thinking about how to convert the above code, so that they can display α to ψ as individual letters rather than all of the letters at the same time.
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