Skip to Main Content
Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition
book

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

by Matthew MacDonald
May 2011
Beginner content levelBeginner
584 pages
17h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

HTML Character Entities

HTML character entities are codes that a browser translates into other characters when the browser displays the page. All HTML character entities start with the ampersand (&) and end with the semicolon (;).

There are two principal reasons to use HTML character entities. First of all, you might want to use a character that has a special meaning in the HTML standard. For example, if you type < in an HTML document, a browser assumes you’re starting to define an element, which makes it difficult to write a pithy bit of logic like “2 < 3.” To get around this, you replace the < symbol with a character entity that represents the less-than symbol. The browser then inserts the actual < character you want when it displays the page.

The other reason to use HTML character entities is because you want to use a special character that’s not easy to type, like an accented letter or a currency symbol. In fact, characters like this are quite possibly not on your keyboard at all.

Table A-2 has the most commonly used HTML entities. For the complete list, which includes many more international language characters, see www.webmonkey.com/reference/Special_Characters. You can also type in certain special characters using a non-English keyboard or pick international language characters from a utility program. See Non-English Languages for more information about these options.

Table A-2. HTML character entities.

Character

Name of Character

What to Type

<

Less than

&lt;

>

Greater than

&gt;

&

Ampersand ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Matthew MacDonald
Learn to Build a Website

Learn to Build a Website

Cassidy Williams, Camryn Williams

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449306823Supplemental ContentErrata Page