HTML Entities List

How to read the table

Each row gives you four interchangeable ways to reach the same character. The name is the most readable, the decimal code is the most universally supported, and the hex code is what you will see in Unicode documentation because it matches the code point directly.

Note that named entities are case-sensitive — the HTML standard requires the name to be written "using the same case" — so Ñ is capital Ñ and ñ is lowercase ñ. The trailing semicolon is required.

The characters you must always escape

If you only memorise a handful, memorise these. The ampersand and the angle brackets stop text from being read as markup; the two quote characters matter inside attribute values. The space variants below them are the ones people reach for when a layout needs a specific gap.

Accented letters and Spanish characters

The block people paste most often, usually when a CMS or an HTML email template has mangled the accents on the way in.

Other accented and European letters

Grave, circumflex, diaeresis and the Nordic, German, Portuguese and Icelandic letters.

Punctuation and typography

Dashes, curly quotes and the marks that separate typeset text from text that was typed. The en dash is for ranges, the em dash for parentheticals, and the ellipsis is one character rather than three periods.

Currency signs

Note that the dollar sign has no HTML entity at all — it is a plain ASCII character and needs no escaping.

Arrows

Single arrows in the four cardinal and four diagonal directions, plus the double-stroke arrows used for logical implication.

Maths, operators and fractions

Everything from the multiplication sign — which is a real character, not a lowercase x — to set notation and pre-composed fractions.

Greek letters

The Greek letters that appear most often in technical writing. Every other letter of the alphabet has an entity too, following the same lowercase and capitalised naming pattern.

Symbols and shapes

Copyright and trademark marks, card suits, stars, ticks, crosses and a few shapes that are handy as list markers.

Four things worth knowing

1. On a page that declares UTF-8, you do not need entities for accents at all. Writing ñ directly is correct, shorter and easier to search. Entities earn their keep in HTML email, legacy systems, RSS feeds and anywhere the encoding of the pipeline is not under your control.
2. ' is a modern addition. It is defined in XML and in the HTML living standard, but it was never part of HTML 4.01, so very old parsers may not recognize it. ' is the universally safe way to escape a single quote.
3.   is not a wider space — it is a space that will not be used as a line-break opportunity, and consecutive ones do not collapse. That second property is why it gets abused for indentation; CSS padding is the right tool for that job.
4. An ampersand followed by letters and a semicolon that do not match a real entity name is what the HTML standard calls an ambiguous ampersand, and it is a validation error. If your text contains literal ampersands, escape them as & rather than hoping the parser guesses.

Encoding a whole block of text

This table is for looking up one character. When you have a paragraph, a template or a scraped page full of ' and & codes, use the HTML entity encoder and decoder on this site instead: it converts in both directions, handles named, decimal and hex notations together, and can escape either just the five dangerous characters or everything non-ASCII. It runs entirely in your browser, so you can paste confidential content without it being uploaded.