Symbols, HTML entities, and how to type them
542 characters — arrows, maths, currency, box drawing, punctuation — each with every encoding you might need to paste somewhere: the named HTML entity where one exists, the numeric entity, the CSS escape, the JavaScript and Python string escapes, the percent-encoded URL form, and the raw UTF-8 bytes.
Got a character you cannot name? Paste it into Identify characters in text above the grid. Every distinct character is broken out with its code point, and anything documented here is linked. It also recognises the classic ’ mojibake and shows you what the text was supposed to say.
Frequently needed
click to openBrowse by group
32 groupsNamed entity, numeric entity, or the character itself?
On a modern page served as UTF-8, pasting the character directly is fine and by far the most readable — a → in your HTML is a → on the page. Entities matter when the encoding is not guaranteed: email templates, XML feeds, generated files, and anything that might be opened by a tool that guesses the charset. Only 173 of these 542 characters have a named entity such as →; the numeric form exists for every character and is the safer default when you are generating markup.
Four characters must always be escaped in HTML regardless: <, >, &, and inside an attribute " — otherwise the browser reads them as markup.