Special Character Picker

The special character picker collects the characters a typist needs but cannot type: dashes, real quotes, primes, legal marks, units and arrows. Every entry carries a named html entity and a numeric reference, so it can be dropped into HTML, Markdown or plain text without guessing.

What is Special Character Picker?

The special character picker gathers the characters that a keyboard cannot produce and that copy-paste usually mangles, organised into four groups with their names and both entity forms.

The four groups, and the characters that cause the most trouble:

• Typographic punctuation: the em dash and en dash, the ellipsis, the bullet, the middle dot, the section and paragraph signs, and the dagger pair.
• Quotes and primes: curly single and double quotes, the prime and double prime used for feet and inches, and the guillemets for French and Italian setting.
• Legal, math and units: copyright, registered and trademark marks, degrees, plus-minus, multiplication and division signs, the micro and ohm signs, and the euro.
• Arrows and marks: the four cardinal arrows, the left-right arrow, a check mark, a star and a heart.

Each row gives the character, its name, its named entity and its numeric reference, and two ways to take it away. The add button appends it to a build-a-string field that can be copied as a whole line, which is how a run of dashes and quotes is assembled for a caption or a legal line; the copy button puts that single character on the clipboard. Filtering works across the character, the name and the entity, so typing dash or arrow narrows the table without leaving the group.

The entity forms are shown side by side because they are not interchangeable in practice. A named entity is readable in source and says what it means, which is why it suits templates and documentation; a numeric reference is universal and needs no name to be defined, which is why it survives in contexts where the page's character encoding has been through too many hands. Both decode to the same character, and the group label makes the distinction obvious while the row is open rather than after something has rendered as mojibake.

Four things the catalogue deliberately does not decide for you, and each one turns up in review.

• It cannot tell whether the chosen font contains a character, so a correct section sign can still fall back to another face and render at a different weight.
• It cannot arbitrate style: an en dash for a numeric range and an em dash for a break is a house rule rather than a fact, and both characters sit in the same group.
• Every row offers an html entity and a numeric reference but no guidance for a plain text file, where neither is decoded and the character itself has to be pasted.
• Choosing between the two entity forms is a decision about the destination rather than about the character, since both decode to the same value.
• The catalogue is finite, so anything exotic belongs in a block explorer, which is where the search by code point lives.

Use it as the everyday shelf rather than the whole repertoire: most of what a page needs is a dash, a quote or a symbol, and those are the characters the four groups cover.

How to use Special Character Picker

1. Choose the group that matches the job and filter by the character's name, so the table stops showing the groups you do not need.
2. Use add to build a string when several marks belong together, or copy for a single character pasted into a document.
3. Pick the entity form from the row: the named form for readable source, the numeric form wherever encoding is uncertain.
4. Check the pasted result in the destination, since a correct character can still render from a fallback face at a different weight.

When to use Special Character Picker vs related tools

Reach for it when a page has straight quotes that should be curly, when a caption needs a real en dash rather than a hyphen, or when someone has to be handed the entity for a character instead of being told its name. The two entity forms are the practical part. For symbols beyond the catalogue the dingbat and symbol explorer walks whole blocks, the character code converter lists every encoding of a character at once, and the Unicode character explorer identifies a character whose name is unknown.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Special Character Picker