How to use the HTML entities list
- Type a name (euro), a symbol (©) or a number (8364) into the filter box.
- Use the group buttons, such as Arrows, Currency or Greek, to show one kind of character.
- Click the character, its named code, or its decimal or hex code to copy it, then paste it into your HTML.
Named and numeric entities
Every character can be written three ways. The copyright sign, for example, is © (named), © (decimal) or © (hex). The numbers are the character’s Unicode code point, shown in the Unicode column as U+00A9, so any character has a numeric entity. Names are a convenience that only some characters have.
HTML5 defines more than 2,000 names. This table has all 252 from HTML 4, which cover Latin-1 letters, Greek, maths symbols and arrows, plus the HTML5 names people reach for most, such as ✓, ' and ½.
The five you must escape
| Character | Entity | When |
|---|---|---|
| & | & |
Always in text, since it starts an entity |
| < | < |
Always in text, since it starts a tag |
| > | > |
Not strictly required, but escaped by convention |
| “ | " |
Inside attribute values in double quotes |
| ’ | ' or ' |
Inside attribute values in single quotes |
' comes from XML and is standard in HTML5. ' does the same job and also works in very old browsers. To escape a whole block of text at once, paste it into the HTML entity encoder.
When you don’t need entities
If a page is saved as UTF-8 and declares <meta charset="utf-8">, which almost every page does today, you can type é, €, ½ or → straight into the HTML. Entities are still handy for characters you can’t see or can’t tell apart: for a space that must not break, ­ for a soft hyphen that only appears when a word wraps, and – or − where a plain hyphen would look the same in the source.