HTML Escape Characters: Complete List of HTML Entities

In HTML, XHTML, or XML, you can use a character escape to represent any Unicode character using only ASCII letters. Character escapes used in markup include numeric character references (NCRs) and named character references. 

A numeric character reference in hexadecimal format. The hex number is case-insensitive, and all numeric character references begin with &# and conclude with ;.

Cases when escapes are useful 

Escapes are very useful for representing characters that are not apparent or are ambiguous. 

Numeric or named character references, as well as CSS escapes, can be used to represent characters in HTML style attribute. The style element HTML can not contain numeric or named character references. The same goes for an external style sheet. 

Cases when escapes should not be used

You should always try to employ an encoding allowing you to represent characters in their natural form. 

If the entities are defined outside of your document and the tools processing the XML do not access the external files, using named characters may become troublesome. Characters will not be used to substitute entity references in such circumstances.

Consequently, if you need to employ escapes in web development, it’s safer to use numeric character references.

HTML Escape Characters

In the table below you can find the complete list of the most useful HTML escape characters. Let us know if you use something we didn’t cover so we can update our list.