HTML Entities Cheat Sheet: Symbols, Quotes, Spaces & Named Characters

HTML entities replace characters that would break markup or that you cannot type easily. In a UTF-8 document you can type © and — directly, but &, <, and > inside text still need encoding. Named entities like   and & remain everyday tools.

This HTML cheat sheet is written for people searching for a fast, accurate reference: students, junior developers, and teams shipping production software. Pin it, copy the snippets, and come back when syntax slips.

Quick reference

• Ampersand: & — always encode & in text and in attribute values.
• Less / greater: < and > when showing tags as text.
• Quotes: " in double-quoted attributes; ' is available but ' is widely used.
• nbsp:   is a non-breaking space. Do not use it to indent layouts.
• Copyright: © or the UTF-8 character ©.
• Dashes: – (–) and — (—). Hyphen-minus - is still the ASCII hyphen.
• Numeric: © decimal, © hex. Prefer named entities when they exist.
• Charset: Entities are not a substitute for <meta charset="UTF-8">.

Copy-paste examples

Safe text and a price line

Encode & in copy. Use UTF-8 for currency symbols if the file is saved as UTF-8.

<p>HTML compares tags with &lt;div&gt; and &amp; attributes.</p>
<p>Price: $19&nbsp;99 &copy; 2026 Acme</p>
<p>Quote: &ldquo;Ship it.&rdquo;</p>

Common mistakes

• Leaving raw & in copy (Tom & Jerry) so the parser treats it as an entity start.
• Indenting with chains of   instead of CSS margin or gap.
• Double-encoding (&) after running text through htmlspecialchars twice.
• Assuming Latin-1 numeric codes without a UTF-8 charset declaration.

FAQ

1. Do I need entities for emoji? No, if the document is UTF-8. Emoji are characters. Entities are for reserved markup chars and a few stubborn symbols.

1. BLOGPH0 vs CSS? Use CSS for layout. Use nbsp only to keep two words or a value and unit on the same line.

1. Named or numeric? Named (©) is readable. Numeric works for any Unicode code point when no name exists.

Related HTML cheat sheets

• Html Cheat Sheet 2026
• Html Forms Cheat Sheet
• Html5 Semantic Tags Cheat Sheet

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