Your cheat sheet for HTML special characters
You need a right arrow in your breadcrumb nav. Or a copyright symbol in the footer. Or you’re writing a tutorial and need to display <div> as literal text without the browser trying to render it. That’s what HTML entities are for, codes that represent characters the browser would otherwise treat as markup or that don’t live on your keyboard.
This is a searchable, categorized table of the most useful ones. Browse by category (basic, symbols, math, arrows, currency, Greek letters), search by name, and click to copy. You get three formats per entity: the rendered character, the named entity (&), and the numeric code (&).
The ones you’ll use constantly
& for &, every literal ampersand in HTML needs this.
< for < and > for >, essential for showing HTML code in tutorials.
" for ", when you need a literal double quote inside an attribute value.
, the non-breaking space, keeps two words from being split across lines.
© for ©, your footer probably needs this.
— for, the em dash, useful in headings and prose.
→ for →, breadcrumbs, “next” links, step indicators.
€ for €, if you’re dealing with European pricing.
Named vs numeric: which should you use?
Named entities like & are readable. You glance at the source and know what character it represents. But not every character has a named entity.
Numeric entities like & (decimal) or & (hex) work for any Unicode character. Need something obscure? The numeric code will always work.
For day-to-day HTML work, use named entities when they exist. Fall back to numeric for anything unusual.
One gotcha with CSS and JavaScript
HTML entities only work in HTML documents. In CSS, use Unicode escapes: \00A9 for ©. In JavaScript, use \u00A9 or just paste the actual character. Don’t try putting © in a JavaScript string, it won’t do what you expect.
For auto-encoding a block of text, the HTML Encoder tool handles the conversion. For ASCII character codes specifically, there’s the ASCII Table.
FAQ
How do I find a specific symbol?
Type a keyword in the search box, “arrow”, “copyright”, “fraction”, “degree”, and the table filters to show matches.
Do all browsers support these entities?
Every entity in this reference works across all modern browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, no issues.
Named or numeric?
Named when available, they’re more readable in source code. Numeric for anything without a named entity, or when you need maximum compatibility.