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

Question

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.

Hooknosed

You should have searched for "octothorpe" – Yardarm

Just out of curiosity, why do you need it? # isn't a reserved character in HTML... If you need to escape it in a URL (to avoid starting a fragment), then using the HTML escape won't do you much good. – Tansey

...have you tried not using a character entity? If you view the source for this page no entity is being used to make the # characters. – Immobilize

i believe stack overflow uses utf-8. what i've inherited doesn't, so that's why. – Hooknosed

@Shog9, Markdown interprets # as "headers", so we need to do # , See the source code of https://mcmap.net/q/260493/-mysql-1093-you-can-39-t-specify-target-table-39-giveaways-39-for-update-in-from-clause/632951 – Gunning

Answer 1

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)      #

Siffre

A simple ascii chart will work just fine. – Gunning

As indicated in another answer, there has been an update allowing to use # also. – Arreola

thx for your answer. would you be able to elaborate a little more: what is the difference between using ` #` vs #? – Cyrilla

@BKSpurgeon: one is written in decimal notation other is written in hex notation. – Siffre

What's the meaning of # in the URL en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_formation#Protostar? – Mettle

@user610620: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment – Siffre

Thanks @BalusC. Now, how is it that # URI fragments for moving down to a lower section of a page is also used for # URI fragments that let people toggle through different columns of a table? Are both usages dependent on HTML or Javacript code? and how do their code differ – Mettle

@user610620: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/… – Siffre

Answer 2

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.

Threesome

Answer 3

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).

Curtsey

percent encoding is especially important when (sigh) your query sting includes an octothorpe, e.g.: http://example.com?search=term#37 where term#37 is your query string. – Mortmain

Answer 4

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.

Galumph

Answer 5

# or #

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

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

Womanish

Answer 6

The numerical reference is #.

Travel

Answer 7

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 ♯

Colmar

Answer 8

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.

Tacita

Oh nevermind. Answering a different question. – Tacita

Funnily enough, you answered what I was wondering about, so +1 – Flinger

Answer 9

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)

Picasso

Answer 10

# 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?)

Strophanthus

Various reason could exist. One which I've experienced is to avoid markdown triggering a number list when the hashtag is used as the first character on a line. – Arreola