Unicode Character Info

Look up code point, HTML entity, UTF-8 bytes, and more for any character.

Character Inspector

Character(s) to inspect

Inspected Characters: 0

Unicode Code Points

Every Unicode character has a unique code point — an integer expressed as U+XXXX. The first 128 (U+0000–U+007F) are ASCII. In HTML, any character can be written as a numeric entity (Afor A) or hex entity (A). In CSS, use the backslash escape (\41) in selectors or content. UTF-8 encodes each code point as 1–4 bytes; ASCII stays as 1 byte.

Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated 5 August 2026

What this tool is used for

Identifying an unexpected character in a file by looking up its code point.
Finding the HTML entity or CSS escape for a character you need.
Checking which block and category a character belongs to.
Seeing a character's UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte sequences.
Confirming that two similar-looking characters are actually different.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a code point tell me?: Its identity and properties: the official name, the general category (letter, number, punctuation, symbol, mark), the script, the bidirectional class, and whether it has case mappings or decompositions.
Why do some characters have no name?: Because control characters (U+0000-001F) and a few others were left unnamed in the standard. Tools show their Unicode 1.0 alias instead — which is why you see NULL or LINE FEED rather than an official name.
What is the difference between a code point and a byte?: A code point is the abstract number, written U+1F600. Its byte representation depends on the encoding: 4 bytes in UTF-8, a surrogate pair in UTF-16, 4 bytes in UTF-32. The code point never changes; the bytes do.
What are the planes?: Unicode is divided into 17 planes of 65,536 code points. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane covering nearly all modern text; emoji and rare scripts live in the Supplementary planes, which is why they need 4 bytes.
Why do two identical-looking characters differ?: Because different scripts contain look-alikes — Latin A, Cyrillic А and Greek Α are three distinct code points. Inspecting the actual code point is how you diagnose a homograph attack or a failed string comparison.
What is a character's general category for?: It classifies the code point — letter, digit, punctuation, mark, symbol, separator — and is what regular expression classes such as `\p{L}` match on. It is the machine-readable answer to "is this a letter".
What is the difference between a character's name and its display?: The name is a fixed, unique identifier assigned by the standard and never changed, even when it contains a typo. The glyph is whatever a font draws, which varies — so the name identifies the character and the appearance does not.

Common errors and gotchas

Assuming one code point per visible character, when many are sequences.
Confusing a code point with its UTF-8 bytes, which are different numbers.
Overlooking that two characters can render identically and compare unequal.
Reading a character's name as its meaning, since names are historical and sometimes misleading.
Assuming a character is displayable, when many have no glyph in any installed font.