Special Symbols and Characters

Every symbol is a Unicode code, and that is why it works almost anywhere.

Unicode gives each character a number, called a code point: letters, arrows, hearts, currencies, spaces and even invisible characters. The standard reserves 1,114,112 positions, from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, and already describes about 150,000 characters. The black star ★ is U+2605; the euro € is U+20AC. Because a character is just text, it can be copied and pasted into any field that accepts Unicode: a social bio, a game name, a spreadsheet, a document or code. What changes from place to place is the font. A symbol only shows up if the reader's system has the glyph; otherwise a box appears. That is why the catalog favors symbols from older Unicode versions, present in most fonts. Some, like ❤ and ✔, have two looks: a monochrome text style and a colorful emoji style. The variation selector U+FE0E asks for the text style and U+FE0F asks for emoji; the Force text style option does that for you. For developers, each symbol shows ready-made formats: the HTML entity (♥ or ♥), the CSS escape (\2665), the JavaScript escape (\u2665, or a braced \u escape outside the basic plane) and the UTF-8 bytes. On Windows, Alt codes also type many characters: with a leading zero (Alt+0169 for ©) it is Windows-1252; without one it is the console OEM code. In Word, typing the hexadecimal code and pressing Alt+X swaps it for the symbol. Spaces and invisible characters have legitimate uses (non-breaking space, soft hyphen, emoji joiner), but they also cause trouble: a hidden U+200B breaks a search, a password or a formula. That is why there is a Text inspector, which lists every character of what you paste and removes the invisible ones. Text with direction controls (such as U+202E) is used in scams to disguise file names and even code, so be wary of pasted text from unknown sources.

Search, click to copy, and paste anywhere.

1. Search by name (heart, arrow, euro), by code (U+2605, ★) or paste the character itself. Use the chips to browse by category, favorites and recents.
2. Click a symbol: it is copied and added to the composition box, where you build a sequence and copy it all at once. Open the detail panel for the Unicode, HTML, CSS, JavaScript or Alt code.
3. Use the Kaomoji, Alt codes and Text inspector tabs for faces, for typing from the keyboard, or for finding and removing invisible characters in pasted text.

Use this tool on your site

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Sources and references for this tool

These references help contextualize formulas, standards, APIs and limitations used on this page. They do not replace professional validation when a result has legal, financial, medical or operational impact.

• The Unicode Standard: Code ChartsUnicode Consortium, Official tables of code points, names and blocks used in the catalog.
• Unicode Emoji Variation SequencesUnicode Consortium, List of symbols that accept the U+FE0E (text) and U+FE0F (emoji) selectors.
• HTML Standard: Named character referencesWHATWG, Official table of named HTML entities, such as ♥ and ★.
• Encoding Standard: windows-1252WHATWG, Windows-1252 byte map used by Alt codes with a leading zero.
• Unicode Security Considerations (UTS #39)Unicode Consortium, Risks of invisible and confusable characters, basis of the usage warnings.

Frequently asked questions

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