Process for displaying special characters

[Jon Greenwood]

Hi

Would appreciate any pointers to designing a way of displaying certain special characters in HTML.

I have a struts 1.3 application which connects to an old database using web services. Some of the data contains special characters such as 'soft hyphen' ascii 173.
This does not display in an HTML browser.

If I wanted to display some special characters, what would be the best way of implementing this?

Can it be achieved by CSS, or a global javascript function, or is there a better way?

All references greatly received.

Thanks in advance