Webmaster in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Chapter 7. Character Entities

The following table lists the defined standard and proposed character entities for HTML, as well as several that are nonstandard but generally supported.

Entity names, if defined, appear for their respective characters and can be used in the character-entity sequence &name; to define any character for display by the browser. Otherwise, or alternatively for named characters, use the character’s three-digit numeral value in the sequence &#nnn; to specially define a character entity. Actual characters, however, may or may not be displayed by the browser, depending on the computer platform and user-selected font for display.

Not all 256 characters in the ISO character set appear in the table. Missing ones are not recognized by the browser as either named or numeric entities.

To be sure that your documents are fully compliant with the HTML and XHTML standards, use only those named character entities with no entries in the conformance column. Characters with a value of “!!!” in the conformance column are not formally defined by the standards; use them at your own risk.

Numeric entity	Named entity	Symbol	Description	Conformance
				Horizontal tab

			Line feed

			Carriage return
 			Space
!		!	Exclamation point
"	"	"	Quotation mark
#		#	Hash mark
$		$	Dollar sign
%		%	Percent sign
&	&	&	Ampersand
'		'	Apostrophe
(		(	Left parenthesis