Character entites serve as references to symbols, shapes and other glyphs that are not commonly encodable in HTML. They're useful for displaying characters beyond the normal range of A – Z, 0 – 9 and the other standard punctuation marks present on the keyboard.
Web designers and developers need to be particuarly cautious in using "unescaped" characters — those not represented by entities — when they code websites. Some unescaped character entities are specially reserved for web-based languages such as HTML.
For example, both the greater than (">") and the less than ("<") characters are used in HTML to create tag markup. Using these characters "unescaped" will lead to invalid code that will render improperly in the web browser.
You want to make sure your HTML document is set-up correctly. First, make sure you have selected an appropriate DOCTYPE. Second, make sure you set the encoding type inside the
of your HTML.If you're going with HTML 4 or any version of XHTML, this means setting up a content-type tag:
If you're opting for HTML 5, the tag is even easier:
In both examples the UTF-8 character set is used. Another popular option is ISO-8859-1. Depending on your purpose, either one is sufficient for Western English. UTF-8 is probably considered the better option, however, as it has a much wider support of native character recognition and is more versatile in handling multilingual support.
Alphanumeric entity references are the standard method of utilizing a character entity on a website.
They start with a standard ampersand ("&") and end with a semi-colon (";"). In between is a short form English-language version of what the entity is.
Example: copyright => © => ©
Entities can also described via a decimal string.
If an alphanumeric version of an entity doesn't exist, you can fall back to using its decimal version. A large handful of the lesser used character entities are described via this method.
Example: Ă => Ă
This site always tries to list the common alphanumeric version of a character entity. If none exists, the decimal version is used as a fallback.
This one is less common than the other two methods, but important in specific CSS usage; namely, the content property.
If you want to render a character entity using the content property in CSS, you can only use its Unicode value. Name or numeric references will improperly render.
Furthermore, Unicode values inside the content property must all begin with a backslash ("\"). See the example below:
selector {
content: "\00A9 Copyright My Company.";
}
© Copyright My Company.
If you're interested in learning more about how Unicode entities work with the CSS content attribute, Introduction to CSS Escape Sequences is a great starting point.
Disclaimer: Entity support differs on a per web brower AND operating system instance. Depending on your configuration, some entities may show up as blank spaces or square boxes. This is out of this website's control.
While every effort has been taken to include as many references as possible, some may not have been included due to the fact that there are literally thousands of entities in existance, many of which are highly obscure and specialized.
Notice any mistakes or issues? Does an entity appear in the wrong category? Is a reference code or unicode number incorrect? Please send us feedback and we'll work to improve the situation. Thank you.