HTML Special Characters Helper for WordPress Plugin Directory
By Scott Reilly
HTML Special Characters Helper is a WordPress app, with a 5.0 average rating from 3 reviews, as of Aug 31, 2026.
HTML Special Characters Helper is a WordPress Plugin Directory app by Scott Reilly. With a rating of 5.0★ from 3 reviews.
AppRanks verdict
Generated from live marketplace data — refreshed daily
HTML Special Characters Helper is a category-leading WordPress app with a limited review volume. Category data on the canonical marketplace listing is currently incomplete, so AppRanks falls back to platform-wide rather than category-relative comparison for this listing. 3 reviews put it in the early-traction tier — useful for early-stage stores willing to be on the leading edge. Early-traction review counts are sensitive to single launch periods or feature events, so a 30-day re-check before bigger commitments often resolves whether the trend is sustained. Paid-only pricing means evaluating fit on the marketplace listing or via the developer's documentation before installing. AppRanks tracks rating, review count, pricing tier, and category position daily — the figures on this page reflect the most recent scrape from the canonical WordPress Plugin Directory listing.
Pros
- +High average rating (5.0★) signals consistent merchant satisfaction
- +Published by Scott Reilly — established developer track record
Cons
- −Limited review base (3) — ratings can shift significantly with new feedback
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How HTML Special Characters Helper works
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Add an admin widget labeled “HTML Special Characters” that is present in the admin Add/Edit Post and Add/Edit Page pages. Clicking on any special character in the widget causes its character encoding to be inserted into the post body text field at the current cursor location (or at the end of the post if the cursor isn’t located in the post body field). Hovering over any of the special characters in the admin widget causes hover text to appear that shows the HTML entity encoding for the character as well as the name of the character.
Note that when used in the visual editor mode the special character itself is added to the post body. Also note that the visual editor has its own special characters popup helper accessible via the advanced toolbar, which depending on your usage, may make this plugin unnecessary for you. In truth, the plugin is intended more for the non-visual (aka HTML) mode as that is the mode I (the plugin author) use.
Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | Author Homepage
Filters The plugin exposes two filters for hooking. Typically, code making use of filters should ideally be put into a mu-plugin or site-specific plugin (which is beyond the scope of this readme to explain).
c2c_html_special_characters (filter) The ‘c2c_html_special_characters’ hook allows you to remove existing characters or entire groups of characters, and/or add new characters or groups of characters.
Arguments:
$codes (array) : An association array in which the keys are a grouping name and the values are associative arrays themselves with the code as the key and the human-friendly descriptions as the values.
Example:
/** * Add a new grouping of characters (accented 'A's). * * @param array $characters Default HTML special characters. * @return array */ function more_html_special_characters( $characters ) { $characters['accented_a'] = array( 'name' => 'Accented A', 'À' => 'A grave accent', 'Á' => 'A accute accent', 'Â' => 'A circumflex', 'Ã' => 'A tilde', 'Ä' => 'A umlaut', 'Å' => 'A ring', 'Æ' => 'AE ligature', ); return $characters; // Important! } add_filter( 'c2c_html_special_characters', 'more_html_special_characters' );
c2c_html_special_characters_post_type (filter) The ‘c2c_html_special_characters_post_type’ hook allows you to specify which post_types for which the HTML Special Characters metabox should be shown.
Arguments:
$post_types (array) : An array of post types. By default, this value is array( 'page', 'post' )
Example:
/** * Show HTML Special Characters Helper for additional post_types. * * @param array $post_types Arry of post types. * @return array */ function more_html_special_characters_post_types( $post_types ) { $post_types[] = 'products'; // Show for products unset( $post_types['page'] ); // Don't show for pages return $post_types; } add_filter( 'c2c_html_special_characters_post_types', 'more_html_special_characters_post_types' );
Competitors & alternatives
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Frequently asked questions
What is HTML Special Characters Helper?
HTML Special Characters Helper is an app for WordPress. It currently holds a 5.0-star rating from 3 merchant reviews, and AppRanks has been tracking its public marketplace data on the refresh cadence published in our methodology. AppRanks tracks its category position, review-velocity trend, and the top alternatives in the same space. Developed by Scott Reilly.