Look up named entities, characters, and numeric codes

Look up the canonical named and decimal HTML character reference for a common symbol.

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ToolHTML Entity Reference
Input
Output
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How it works

A curated WHATWG character-reference subset pairs each named spelling with its Unicode character and decimal numeric form. Search compares the exact character as well as the entity name, decimal code, and human-readable description without parsing a fragment of HTML.

  • Every named spelling is displayed with its terminating semicolon because that is the conforming syntax.
  • An empty filter lists the common subset rather than claiming to reproduce the Standard’s complete named-character table.

Worked example

Look up arrow symbols
Filter HTML entities to find arrow symbols
Input
											arrow
Output
												Entity         Char  Code       Description
--------------------------------------------------
←         ←     ←    Left arrow
→         →     →    Right arrow
↑         ↑     ↑    Up arrow
↓         ↓     ↓    Down arrow

When to use this

HTML text escapes ampersands that could begin references, source examples show less-than signs without opening tags, and publishing systems encode non-breaking spaces, quotation marks, and currency symbols.

Edge cases

  • &copy without its semicolon is non-conforming and has context-sensitive legacy parsing; the lookup displays ©.
  • A literal < search resolves to &lt; instead of treating the query as an opening tag.
  • &nbsp; displays U+00A0, which can look like an ordinary blank even though it prevents a normal line break; the row labels that distinction.

References