A Simple Character Entity Chart

For those who use characters in their copy that don’t normally appear on the keyboard, it’s always been a hit-and-miss game of tracking down the ISO character entity and choosing between the named and numeric value. In fact, so many books on HTML, as well as online resources, have provided the wrong entities for so long, few knew it until the W3C validator started throwing them back as errors. You can’t imagine how many em-dashes I had to find and convert from — to the correct —.

The W3C character entity reference is certainly definitive, but not practical. It offers no display of how these entities might be rendered, leaving you to copy and paste based on descriptions until you find the right one.

Well, I got sick of guessing, so I took the W3C documentation and turned it into a handy chart for my staff. Now it sits on our intranet for all to enjoy. Oh… and here… now… as well.

For those who might not normally use character entities, or who’ve never heard of The Elements of Typographic Style, you might not have been exposed to reasons why you would even care about characters not on your keyboard. I’d suggest you surf over to the A List Apart article The Trouble With EM ‘n EN.

By the way, if you need to know what browsers support what character entities, just view this page and look for the characters in the tables. One column shows the character as called by its numeric entity, and one shows it as called by its named entity. This is the chart for HTML 4.x, but also applies to XHTML 1.x.

Character entity references in HTML 4

The charts below will allow you to copy and paste the appropriate character and numeric entities for your documents. To be sure a particular browser supports the entities (both named and numeric), simply open your browser to this pages and view the charts. If the character you want doesn’t appear in the target browser, it doesn’t work (simple, huh?).

What you’ll find below is the copy of the character entity specification from the W3C with my tabled versions of the entities interspersed.

24.1 Introduction to character entity references

A character entity reference is an SGML construct that references a character of the document character set.

HTML 4.x, as well as XHTML 1.x, supports several sets of character entity references:

• ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) characters In accordance with section 14 of [RFC1866], the set of Latin-1 entities has been extended by this specification to cover the whole right part of ISO-8859-1 (all code positions with the high-order bit set), including the already commonly used  , © and ®. The names of the entities are taken from the appendices of SGML (defined in [ISO8879]).
• symbols, mathematical symbols, and Greek letters. These characters may be represented by glyphs in the Adobe font “Symbol”.
• markup-significant and internationalization characters (e.g., for bidirectional text).

The following sections present the complete lists of character entity references.

ISO 8859-1

24.2 Character entity references for ISO 8859-1 characters

The character entity references in this section produce characters whose numeric equivalents should already be supported by conforming HTML 2.0 user agents. Thus, the character entity reference ÷ is a more convenient form than ÷ for obtaining the division sign (÷).

To support these named entities, user agents need only recognize the entity names and convert them to characters that lie within the repertoire of [ISO88591].

Character 65533 (FFFD hexadecimal) is the last valid character in UCS-2. 65534 (FFFE hexadecimal) is unassigned and reserved as the byte-swapped version of ZERO WIDTH NON-BREAKING SPACE for byte-order detection purposes. 65535 (FFFF hexadecimal) is unassigned.

24.2.1 The list of characters

Symbols, Mathematical Symbols, and Greek Letters

24.3 Character entity references for symbols, mathematical symbols, and Greek letters

The character entity references in this section produce characters that may be represented by glyphs in the widely available Adobe Symbol font, including Greek characters, various bracketing symbols, and a selection of mathematical operators such as gradient, product, and summation symbols.

To support these entities, user agents may support full [ISO10646] or use other means. Display of glyphs for these characters may be obtained by being able to display the relevant [ISO10646] characters or by other means, such as internally mapping the listed entities, numeric character references, and characters to the appropriate position in some font that contains the requisite glyphs.

When to use Greek entities. This entity set contains all the letters used in modern Greek. However, it does not include Greek punctuation, precomposed accented characters nor the non-spacing accents (tonos, dialytika) required to compose them. There are no archaic letters, Coptic-unique letters, or precomposed letters for Polytonic Greek. The entities defined here are not intended for the representation of modern Greek text and would not be an efficient representation; rather, they are intended for occasional Greek letters used in technical and mathematical works.

24.3.1 The list of characters

Markup-Significant and Internationalization Characters

24.4 Character entity references for markup-significant and internationalization characters

The character entity references in this section are for escaping markup-significant characters (these are the same as those in HTML 2.0 and 3.2), for denoting spaces and dashes. Other characters in this section apply to internationalization issues such as the disambiguation of bidirectional text (see the section on bidirectional text for details).

Entities have also been added for the remaining characters occurring in CP-1252 which do not occur in the HTMLlat1 or HTMLsymbol entity sets. These all occur in the 128 to 159 range within the CP-1252 charset. These entities permit the characters to be denoted in a platform-independent manner.

To support these entities, user agents may support full [ISO10646] or use other means. Display of glyphs for these characters may be obtained by being able to display the relevant [ISO10646] characters or by other means, such as internally mapping the listed entities, numeric character references, and characters to the appropriate position in some font that contains the requisite glyphs.

24.4.1 The list of characters