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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:48:26+00:00

This has been confusing me for some time. With the advent of UTF-8 as

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This has been confusing me for some time. With the advent of UTF-8 as the de-facto standard in web development I’m not sure in which situations I’m supposed to use the HTML entities and for which ones should I just use the UTF-8 character. For example,

  • em dash (–, &emdash;)
  • ampersand (&, &)
  • 3/4 fraction (¾, ¾)

Please do shed light on this issue. It will be appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. You don’t generally need to use HTML character entities if your editor supports Unicode. Entities can be useful when:

    • Your keyboard does not support the character you need to type. For example, many keyboards do not have em-dash or the copyright symbol.
    • Your editor does not support Unicode (very common some years ago, but probably not today).
    • You want to make it explicit in the source what is happening. For example, the   code is clearer than the corresponding white space character.
    • You need to escape HTML special characters like <, &, or '.
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