HTML Entities
HTML entities (also known as character entity references) enable you to use characters that aren't supported by the document's character encoding or your keyboard. For example, you display a copyright symbol by typing ©, or a trademark symbol by typing ™.
Entity Examples
Below are some examples of HTML entities that you may need to use on a website at some point.
| Code | Result |
|---|---|
|
† ★ → © ™ & · ¼ é |
Numeric Character References
You can also use numeric character references to write character entities (as seen by some of the examples above). Numeric character references can be defined with either a decimal or hexadecimal value (although decimal is more common). The numeric character reference for the copyright symbol is © (decimal) and © (hexadecimal).
A key benefit that numeric character references have over entities is that they can be used to specify any unicode character, whereas entities can only specify some.
For a list of HTML entities, see HTML special characters.