Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

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 for the desired character. Each of these characters has a numeric value associated with it. You can insert the number of that value in the entity. For example, the numeric entity value for a copyright symbol is 169. An HTML statement using that symbol looks as follows:

<P STYLE="align: center">&#169;1998 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="align: center">&copy;1998 MegaCorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.</P>

In this appendix, every entity defined in the HTML 4.0 specification is listed in alphabetical order. For each entity, the version of Navigator and Internet Explorer that first supported the entity is shown in the table. Browser support is indicated for the Win32 version of the browser as run under Windows 95. Some characters may not be available in all fonts or on all operating system platforms. A large number of entities in the table for math and technical ...