🔣 HTML Entity Reference
Search common HTML character entities by name, numeric code or the character itself.
What the table holds
Forty-eight entities you actually reach for - the five markup characters, currency and legal signs, dashes and quotes, arrows, card suits, maths operators and a handful of Greek letters. Each row gives the rendered symbol, the named form, the decimal numeric form and a description, and the search box matches a substring of any of those four columns.
© © © all render as the copyright sign
— — — em dashThe table lists the decimal form; the hexadecimal spelling with &#x
is equally valid and is what you will see in most XML. So typing 8212,
mdash or dash all find the same row.
What you actually have to escape
- In body text, only
&and<. Escaping>too is a sensible habit. Inside an attribute you must also escape whichever quote character wraps the value. - Everything else is optional on a UTF-8 page. A literal
©or→in the source is fine once the file is saved as UTF-8 and declares<meta charset="UTF-8">. Entities are for clarity, for characters that are hard to type, and for markup that must survive being copied through older tooling.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between and a normal space?
A non-breaking space is never collapsed with its neighbours and never becomes a line break, so it keeps "10 kg" or "Mr Smith" together. That also makes it the wrong tool for indentation or layout gaps, where padding and margin belong.
Why does break my RSS feed or SVG file?
XML predefines only five named entities - amp, lt, gt, quot and apos - so anything
else is an undeclared entity and the parser stops. Use the numeric form
  instead, which works in HTML and XML alike.
Should I use ' for an apostrophe?
Prefer '. The named version was introduced with XHTML and is
fine in HTML5 and XML, but old HTML 4 parsers show it literally. Numeric references
never have that problem.