Character entity references in HTML

This document provides, in tabular form, the character entity references used in HTML.

These entity references are defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent, http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-symbol.ent and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent. Those are the normative definitions of these characters. This document is an attempt to present the information in these files in a more human-readable and more accessible format. This document makes no claims to being normative, and the three files referenced above should be consulted for the normative version of this information.

The reader is also directed to the section on character entity references in the HTML 4.0 Specification (which is referenced by the XHTML 1.0 Specification, which is the Current Version of HTML as of this writing).

The editing performed on the original files has been kept to an absolute minimum. The comments come directly from comments the files.

It is important to note that some browsers may fail to recognise some of these character entity references, the numerical representation (e.g. using ™ rather than ™ to represent ™) is generally more reliable, if inconvenient for the coder. The numerical form is the only way to use characters outside of those listed here if they are not available in the character set you encode the document in.

Legal Notice

The files that were the source of this document are the copyright of the W3C and its use is governed by its Software Notice and License. In turn they make use of materials that are the copyright of the International Organization for Standardization, and as such contain this notice:

Portions (C) International Organization for Standardization 1986
Permission to copy in any form is granted for use with conforming SGML systems and applications as defined in ISO 8879, provided this notice is included in all copies.

Any other work presented here is ©2002 Jon Hanna, who allows full rights to it to everyone without obligation as long as any use is in accordance with the copyright notices mentioned above.

Differences between XHTML1.0 and HTML4.0

The only difference I have found between the versions of these entities used by HTML4.0 and XHTML1.0 is that XHTML1.0 defines ' as a "straight" apostrophe. All XML applications already have this entity defined, but the XML Specification recommends that DTDs define it for interoperability with SGML applications. HTML4.0 does not define this entity and many HTML browsers will fail to recognise it, including some which do recognise it when acting as XML document viewers.

Note on capitalisation

These character entity references are case sensitive. Some readers of this document who are doing so by using a screen-reader or another medium that does not preserve or indicate case may have difficulties knowing which case is to be used, and can benefit from knowing the following rules:

1. Unless stated otherwise in this list, all entities are in lower-case.
2. The entity reference for forms of latin characters with diacritical marks etc. will begin with the letter or letters in question, followed by an abbreviated description of how the character differs from the unadorned form. If the letter is a capital then it will appear capitalised in the entity name, but with the rest in lower case, e.g. à beginning with a lower-case "a" encodes a lower-case letter "a" with a grave accent, whereas À beginning with a upper-case "A" encodes a upper-case "A" with a grave accent. Similarly the lower-case "o" and "e" of œ result in a lower-case o-e ligature, but the upper-case "O" and "E" of Œ result in an upper-case o-e ligature.
3. The entities for capital Greek letters begin with a capital letter, with the rest in lower case.
4. The captial forms of the letters þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") are written entirely in capitals.
5. Double prime is distinguished from prime, and Double dagger from dagger, by the use of an initial capital.
6. All the arrows have names ending with the sequence "arr". If the "A" of "Arr" is capitalised an double arrow is indicated (there is no double form of ↵).

There are many cases of letters which will appear similar when represented with some media, but which are actually different. An example is Σ and ∑, which can be represented exactly the same on screen or in print (and should be at least similar in those media), although the former is the capital Greek letter Sigma, and the latter the mathematical symbol for "sum", and hence should render completely differently on screen readers, etc. In case of confusion on such matters the Unicode standard should be consulted.

Jon Hanna