HTML Entities Cheatsheet & Online Reference

HTML entities are a mechanism for coding references to characters that are not easily entered via the keyboard or need a special representation to distinguish them from characters such as <, > etc. that have a special significance in HTML. Entities are expressed in one of two forms:

• &name; – by reference to the name of the entity.
• &number; – by specifying the ISO code for the entity.

Note the terminating semicolon – ;. Entity names are case sensitive. The most commonly used entities are listed in the table below. Please click on the links below to view entities that category. There are few entity names, indicated as &name; that are not correctly interpreted by Internet Explorer. In such cases it is better to use the corresponding entity number.

In addition to the named entities, it is possible to display most Unicode characters by specifying them in the form &#dddd; or &#Xhhhh; where dddd is the decimal Unicode for the character and hhhh is the equivalent hexadecimal value. Even when using named entities it pays to use the shorter of the name or number representations – except when future readability is likely to be a concern.

The space characters have been underlined in red to make them visible.