How to Add a Unicode Character to HTML?

You can add a Unicode character to an HTML document by creating an HTML entity from:

• A named character reference — available for most common characters;
• A numeric code reference (either in decimal or hexadecimal) — available for all characters.

For example, the copyright symbol (©) is represented in the following way:

• copy — named reference;
• 169 — decimal numeric reference;
• U+000A9 — hexadecimal numeric reference.

You can create an HTML entity from any of these in the following ways:

• © — by adding the named reference between & and ;
• © — by adding the decimal reference between &# and ;
• © — by adding the hexadecimal reference between &#x and ;

Things to remember:

• All HTML entities begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semi-colon (;);
• For numeric references (i.e. both, decimal and hexadecimal) you must add a hash (#) after the ampersand (&);
• For hexadecimal references you must also prefix the hexadecimal number with x to indicate that the numbers that follow should be interpreted as hexadecimal;
• For hexadecimal references, you may have noticed that U+000 was omitted from the entity. This is because U+ is merely used as a convention to denote that the hexadecimal digits that follow are Unicode code points, and this is never added to the HTML entity. The leading zeros, however, are optional to add.