Using HTML entities

React will escape HTML entities (like  , ×) in the text elements.

You could just use literal character: × or unicode code, which is converted to the character by Cljs compiler: \u00D7.

HTML entities work in React JSX because JSX will unescape the entity code to literal character.

You can do the same in ClojureScript by using goog.string/unescapeEntities:

(ns example
  (:require [goog.string :as gstr]))

(defn comp []
  [:h1 "Foo" (gstr/unescapeEntities "&times;")])

Note: Yes, this can be inconvenient, but Reagent can't do this automatically as finding and replacing entities during runtime would be slow.