Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, 3rd Edition

Appendix B. HTML Character Entities

To display symbols and characters beyond the collection of common ASCII alphanumeric values (0–127), browsers recognize a special coding that lets you insert such characters into HTML document content. These entity characters start with an ampersand symbol (&) and end with a semicolon (;). Between those symbols goes a representation of the desired character in your choice of letters or numbers. For example, the numeric entity value for a copyright symbol is 169. An HTML statement using that symbol looks as follows:

<p style="text-align: center">&#169;2002 MegaCorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.</p>

Because the numbering system is not easy to remember, entities also have case-sensitive word or abbreviation equivalents for their values. For the copyright symbol, for example, the entity is ©. This makes the code more readable, as in the following:

<p style="text-align: center">&copy;2002 MegaCorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.</p>

This table lists every entity defined in the HTML 4 specification in alphabetical order. Recent browsers support the vast majority of these characters, but the user’s operating system version and its internal character set also influence whether a visitor’s browser will render any particular character.

Alpha entity	Numeric entity	Character	Description
Á	Á	Á	Capital letter A with acute
á	á	á	Small letter a with acute
Â	Â	Â	Capital letter A with circumflex
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