HTML Special Characters Reference

Quickie:

‘ ’ ‘ – ’

“ ” “ – ”

… …

& &

®
®

— —

– –

− −

HTML Special Character Entities

Web pages want to hang-out with everyone else —they’re not anti-printed page— they want to fit in… The thing is, web browsers have a hard time reading all of our favorite post script punctuation. Some characters are used by html for markup, and therefore render funny, like quotation marks for instance. Other characters, like the em dash, are just simply not included in the html specification.

That’s what html special characters are for. They are special html entities that you can use to convey style and tone— and keep you from looking like an idiot. As a front end developer, I am constantly looking these guys up and I haven’t found a good quick reference yet. So I have compiled one bellow:

Deprecated, Invalid & Sucky

All of  - 
’ (right single quote)
‘ (left single quote)

Use Me

Opening single quote ‘
Closing single quote or Apostrophe ’
Opening double quote “
Closing double quote ”
Elipsis …
Ampersand &
Opening Chevron (<) <
Closing Chevron (>) >
Em dash — indicates a break in thought, and is twice the width of En.
En dash (–) indicates a range, joins compound (already hyphenated) words, and is half the width of Em. (Note: Neither Em, nor Em are a hyphen which is used to join compound words, and for which there is no special html character for).
Minus sign −
Soft hyphen  (no one uses this) indicates where the word should break if it gets wrapped to the next line by the browser.
Normal word space  
Non-breaking space   or  
Thin space  
Em Space  
En Space  
Zero width space 
Zero width no-break space (Note: The above five spaces only work well with Arial Unicode MS according to Peter Sheerin).
Full Stop ․ (Tiny period)

The html times