Punctuation

Entities Punctuation

Unicode provides punctuation characters for quotations, dashes, ellipses, bullets, primes, spacing, and other typographic uses. These characters can help webpages display punctuation more accurately than substituting ordinary keyboard characters.

Many commonly used punctuation marks have named HTML character references. They can also be represented with decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references or entered directly in a UTF-8 HTML document.

Quotation Marks

Unicode includes typographic quotation marks that provide opening and closing forms for quoted text. These are often called curly quotes or smart quotes.

Dashes & Hyphens

Hyphens and dashes have different typographic purposes. The hyphen joins words, the en dash commonly represents ranges, and the em dash can mark a break or interruption in a sentence.

General Punctuation

General punctuation characters include ellipses, bullets, daggers, reference marks, and other symbols commonly used in written and typographic content.

Prime Marks

Prime marks are used in mathematics, measurements, coordinates, and other technical notation. They are distinct characters from apostrophes and quotation marks.

Spacing Characters

Unicode and HTML provide several space characters with different widths and line-breaking behavior. These characters are useful when a specific typographic space is required rather than ordinary CSS layout spacing.

Using Punctuation in HTML

Punctuation characters can be entered directly in UTF-8 HTML or written with named, decimal, or hexadecimal character references. Character references are particularly useful when you want the source code to clearly identify a specific typographic character.

<p>&ldquo;Learning HTML is useful.&rdquo;</p>
<p>HTML &mdash; the language of the Web.</p>
<p>Pages 10&ndash;20</p>
<p>More information&hellip;</p>