HTML Entities

HTML entities encode characters that are either reserved in HTML syntax or unavailable on the keyboard. The five mandatory ones: < for <, > for >, & for &, " for ", and ' for '. Writing a raw < in HTML would start a tag instead of displaying the character.

Two formats exist: named (© for ©) and numeric (© or ©). Named entities are easier to read but only ~250 are defined; numeric entities work for any Unicode code point. Our HTML symbols reference lists all named entities by category, and the HTML entity encoder converts text to entities and back. Note: in modern UTF-8 pages, you can type most characters directly - entities are only required for the 5 reserved characters and for characters your editor cannot input.