I’ve been developing for quite awhile, and haven’t found an official HTML entities list sanctioned by the W3C until recently.
The official list of HTML entities and special characters presented in a nice table by codes from the W3C.
It’s worthy to note that the 2nd column is probably the version you want to use if you’re ever going to use XHTML or XML in your applications – as XML only supports ', &, and "e;, I got an error today when using — instead of —, prompting me to dig a little deeper for an official resource.
Use the HTML Entity Escaping form to auto-convert special characters in your markup to HTML entities..