HTML Special Characters

The reference contains 487 characters in twelve sections: typography, spaces, arrows, currencies, mathematics, fractions, Greek letters, shapes, chess, zodiac, emoji, and European letters. Search and section filtering are available, and any character is copied with a click.

For each character the page shows every form of notation: a named entity like —, the numeric code, the hexadecimal code, and the CSS notation.

When a special character is required

Three characters cannot be typed directly into markup. Angle brackets open and close tags, and the ampersand starts an entity itself, so they are written as <, >, and &.

A separate case is the non-breaking space  . A browser collapses consecutive spaces into one, so they cannot create an indent. What it can do is keep a line from breaking in an awkward spot: between a number and its unit of measurement, or after a short preposition.

Entity names are case-sensitive: Á and á produce different letters, Á and á.

Unicode table

Below the reference there is a paginated table of Unicode codes. It is useful for characters that have no name of their own.