HTML Entities

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Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities.

HTML Entities

Some characters are reserved in HTML.

If you use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, the browser might mix them with tags.

Character entities are used to display reserved characters in HTML.

A character entity looks like this:

&entity_name;

OR

&#entity_number;

To display a less than sign (<) we must write: &lt; or &#60;

Advantage of using an entity name: An entity name is easy to remember.
Disadvantage of using an entity name: Browsers may not support all entity names, but the support for entity numbers is good.

Non-breaking Space

A commonly used entity in HTML is the non-breaking space: &nbsp;

A non-breaking space is a space that will not break into a new line.

Two words separated by a non-breaking space will stick together (not break into a new line). This is handy when breaking the words might be disruptive.

Examples:

• § 10
• 10 km/h
• 10 PM

Another common use of the non-breaking space is to prevent browsers from truncating spaces in HTML pages.

If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them. To add real spaces to your text, you can use the &nbsp; character entity.

Tip: The non-breaking hyphen (&#8209;) is used to define a hyphen character (‑) that does not break into a new line.

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Some Useful HTML Character Entities

ResultDescriptionEntity NameEntity Number
non-breaking space&nbsp;&#160;<less than&lt;&#60;>greater than&gt;&#62;&ampersand&amp;&#38;"double quotation mark&quot;&#34;'single quotation mark (apostrophe)&apos;&#39;¢cent&cent;&#162;£pound&pound;&#163;¥yen&yen;&#165;€euro&euro;&#8364;©copyright&copy;&#169;®registered trademark&reg;&#174;

Note: Entity names are case sensitive.

Combining Diacritical Marks

A diacritical mark is a "glyph" added to a letter.

Some diacritical marks, like grave (  ̀) and acute (  ́) are called accents.

Diacritical marks can appear both above and below a letter, inside a letter, and between two letters.

Diacritical marks can be used in combination with alphanumeric characters to produce a character that is not present in the character set (encoding) used in the page.

Here are some examples:

MarkCharacterConstructResult ̀aa&#768;à ́aa&#769;á̂aa&#770;â ̃aa&#771;ã ̀OO&#768;Ò ́OO&#769;Ó̂OO&#770;Ô ̃OO&#771;Õ

You will see more HTML symbols in the next chapter of this tutorial.