Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Character Entities

The following table collects the defined standard, proposed, and several nonstandard (but generally supported) character entities for HTML.

Entity names, if defined, appear for their respective characters and can be used in the HTML 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 numerical value in the sequence &#nnn; to specifically define an HTML 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 4.0 standard, use only those named character entities whose conformance column is blank. Defy compliance by using the nonstandard (N) entities.

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
)		)	Right parenthesis
*		*	Asterisk
+		+	Plus sign
,		,	Comma
-		-	Hyphen
.		.	Period
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