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 ...