CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcharacterentityhtml-entitiescharacter-entities
chimerical
chimerical

Reputation: 6023

What's the HTML character entity for the # sign?

What's the HTML character entity for the # sign? I've looked around for "pound" (which keeps returning the currency), and "hash" and "number", but what I try doesn't seem to turn into the right character.

Upvotes: 82

Views: 115875

Answers (10)

Danny Beckett
Danny Beckett

Reputation: 20866

The standard way is any of these:

  • #
  • #
  • #

However I was coming across an issue where an external tool we use would replace all of these with # in the page's source code, when we needed it to be kept encoded (for further processing by our own tools).

Instead of using a number sign you can use a full-width number sign using either of these:

  • ＃
  • ＃

The two hash-signs look virtually identical on my Windows system:

# vs. ＃

(Normal one on the left, full-width one on the right)

Upvotes: 1

Super Kai - Kazuya Ito
Super Kai - Kazuya Ito

Reputation: 1

You can display "#" in some ways as shown below:

# or # or #

In addtion, you can display "♯" which is different from "#" in some ways as shown below:

♯ or ♯ or ♯

Upvotes: 4

systemaddict
systemaddict

Reputation: 363

We've got some wild answers here and actually we might have to cut hairs to determine if it qualifies as an HTML Entity, but what I believe you're looking for is the named anchor.

This allows references to different sections within an HTML document via hyperlink and specifically uses the octothorp (hash symbol, number symbol, pound symbol)

exampleDomain.com/exampleSilo/examplePage.html#2ndBase

Would be an example of how it's used.

Upvotes: 2

user3186206
user3186206

Reputation:

# is the best option because it is the only one that doesn't include the # (hash) in it. Supported by old browsers or not, it is the best practice going forward.

(What is the point of encoding something using the same symbol you are encoding?)

Upvotes: -1

acdcjunior
acdcjunior

Reputation: 135862

For # we have #.

Bear in mind, though, it is a new entity (IE9 can't recognize it, for instance). For wide support, you'll have to resort, as said by others, the numerical references # and, in hex, &#x23.

If you need to find out others, there are some very useful tools around.

Upvotes: 26

Matthew Flaschen
Matthew Flaschen

Reputation: 285077

The numerical reference is #.

Upvotes: 4

David Cary
David Cary

Reputation: 5510

The "#" -- like most Unicode characters -- has no particular name assigned to it in the W3 list of "Character entity references" http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html . So in HTML it is either represented by itself as "#" or a numeric character entity "#" or "#" (without quotes), as described in "HTML Document Representation" http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html .

Alas, all three of these are useless for escaping it in a URL. To transmit a "#" character to the web server in a URL, you want to use "URL encoding" aka "percent encoding" as described in RFC 3986, and replace each "#" with a "%23" (without quotes).

Upvotes: 17

Guffa
Guffa

Reputation: 700840

There is no HTML character entity for the # character, as the character has no special meaning in HTML.

You have to use a character code entity like # if you wish to HTML encode it for some reason.

Upvotes: 9

BalusC
BalusC

Reputation: 1109715

You can search it on the individual character at fileformat.info. Enter # as search string and the 1st hit will lead you to U+0023. Scroll a bit down to the 2nd table, Encodings, you'll see under each the following entries:

HTML Entity (decimal)  #
HTML Entity (hex)      #

Upvotes: 79

whatsisname
whatsisname

Reputation: 6190

# or #

http://www.asciitable.com/ has information. Wikipedia also has pages for most unicode characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

Upvotes: 8

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