character   ref # ref name
curly left single quote ‘ ‘ ‘
curly right single quote ’ ’ ’
curly left double quote “ “ “
curly right double quote ” ” ”
en dash – – –
em dash — — —
ellipsis … … …
left angle quote « « «
right angle quote » » »
single quote (apostrophe) ' ' '
double quote " " "
hyphen - -  
backslash \ \  
forward slash / /  
period (dot) . .  
space    
non-breaking space      
ampersand & & &
less than < &#0060; &lt;
greater than > &#0062; &gt;

I was going to include this table as part of a longer, related entry, but then I thought it might be better posted as a stand-alone reference.

The first several items are things that WordPress will create for you to make your posts prettier. For example, WP will convert normal quotes into curly quotes and change three consecutive dots into an ellipsis. This is often desirable, but can also be a nuisance.

The »right angle quotation mark» are used by default in page titles and «left and right» often as navigation icons. (I like to use the right pointing one for representing menu tree paths, e.g. System » Preferences » Keyboard.)

Some of the characters are ones you might want to encode in some situations to prevent WordPress interference with your text, for example, hyphens and dots to stop conversions to en/em dashes and ellipses. The last three are the standard characters you’ll always want to encode for basic HTML compliance and are included here for good measure.

Please let me know of other WordPress-related character entities I neglected to mention!

And:

Some other characters I found and thought I might want to use someday…

character   ref # ref name
middle dot · &#0183; &middot;
left arrow ← &#8592; &larr;
up arrow ↑ &#8593; &uarr;
right arrow → &#8594; &rarr;
down arrow ↓ &#8595; &darr;
leftright arrow ↔ &#8596; &harr;

References

Related