Commercial At @

The Commercial At character (@) is a standard HTML entity defined in the HTML specification. In HTML source code, it can be written using the named entity reference @, the decimal numeric character reference @, or the hexadecimal numeric reference @. The character is assigned Unicode code point U+0040 in the Universal Character Set.

The commercial at sign (@) is universally recognized as the separator in email addresses and as the mention/tag symbol in social media platforms. In programming, it serves various roles: decorators in Python, annotations in Java, and array operators in PHP. Its original meaning relates to pricing ('5 items @ $2 each').

Technical character entities represent brackets, delimiters, and punctuation marks that frequently require escaping in HTML source code and programming contexts. Characters like curly braces, square brackets, pipes, and backslashes often carry special meaning in templating engines, regular expressions, or markup parsers, making their explicit HTML entity encoding important for preventing unintended interpretation by the browser or build tools.

When deciding how to encode the Commercial At character in your HTML documents, the named entity @ is generally the most readable choice for developers reviewing or maintaining source code. The decimal form @ and hexadecimal form @ are equally valid alternatives that work in contexts where named entities may not be supported, or when generating HTML output programmatically from server-side code. All three representations produce identical visual output in every modern web browser.

Use the at sign entity when you want to display email addresses in HTML without them being automatically linked or harvested by spam bots. Entity encoding the @ character is a basic email obfuscation technique, though modern spam bots can decode entities.