List of XML and HTML character entity references

In SGML, HTML and XML documents, the logical constructs known as character data and attribute values consist of sequences of characters, in which each character can manifest directly (representing itself), or can be represented by a series of characters called a character reference, of which there are two types: a numeric character reference and a character entity reference. This article lists the character entity references that are valid in HTML and XML documents.

Character reference overview

In HTML and XML, a numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Coded Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format: &#xhhhh; or &#nnn; where the x must be lowercase in XML documents, hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form and nnn is the code point in decimal form. The hhhh (or nnn) may be any number of hexadecimal (or decimal) digits and may include leading zeros. The hhhh for hexadecimal digits may mix uppercase and lowercase letters, though uppercase is the usual style. The XML and HTML standards restrict the usable code points to a set of valid values, which is a subset of UCS/Unicode code point values, that excludes all code points assigned to non-characters or to surrogates, and most code points assigned to C0 and C1 controls (with the exception of line separators and tabulations treated as white spaces).

By contrast, a character entity reference refers to a sequence of one or more characters by the name of an entity which has the desired characters as its replacement text. The format is: &name; where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. The semicolon is usually required in the character entity reference, unless marked otherwise in the table below (see ). The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language), or declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD) by using <!ENTITY name "value">.