This chart includes the codes for some of the most commonly used "special characters" you might want to include in your Web pages. Just use the code in place of the special character within your HTML and the browser will display the corresponding character. If you'd like to add foreign language characters, mathematical equations or unusual punctuation marks to your Web pages, you'll need to use HTML special character references to make sure they can be viewed by the widest possible audience. Even if you don't have these special characters on your keyboard, you can still refer to the letter or symbol using special code in your HTML source code and it will be displayed on the page.

You can specify special characters and letters with either a character reference or entity reference:

A character reference consists of an ampersand (&) followed by a hash symbol (#) and the decimal number corresponding to the character, and ends with a semicolon (;).

Entity references have three parts as well, but they use symbolic names instead of numbers to represent the characters. Each entity reference consists of an ampersand (&) followed by the name of the entity and ending with a semicolon (;). Some special characters do not have corresponding entity references; for these characters you'll have to use the numerical reference.

To add one of these special characters to your Web pages, copy and paste either the character reference or entity reference shown for the character into your HTML source code where you want the character to appear. Please note that the entity references are case sensitive.