Sometimes we need to create a static html page which displays words with special characters like Ä, ä, Ö, ö, Ü, ü and ß. In order to make these characters can be displayed correctly by webbrowser, we need to convert them in html special character format. I use awk to convert all of those characters into html format.
In this example I need to list file names in a folder and save it as html file. Here is my code:
ls -la /path/to/folder/ | awk '{ gsub (/ /,"\ ") gsub (/ä/,"\ä") gsub (/ö/,"\ö") gsub (/ü/,"\ü") gsub (/ß/,"\ß") gsub (/Ä/,"\Ä") gsub (/Ö/,"\Ö") gsub (/Ü/,"\Ü") ;print $0"<br>"}' >> /path/to/filename.html
With that code above I can see a list of files using webbrowser and get appearance as if I would list it using linux terminal.