HTML Entities
Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities.
HTML Entities
Some characters are reserved in HTML.
If you use the less than (<
) or greater than (>
) signs in your text, the browser might mix them with tags.
Character entities are used to display reserved characters in HTML.
A character entity looks like this:
To display a less than sign (<
) we must write: <
or <
Advantage of using an entity name: An entity name is easy to remember.
Disadvantage of using an entity name: Browsers may not support all entity names, but the support for entity numbers is good.
Non-breaking Space
A commonly used entity in HTML is the non-breaking space:
A non-breaking space is a space that will not break into a new line.
Two words separated by a non-breaking space will stick together (not break into a new line). This is handy when breaking the words might be disruptive.
Examples:
- § 10
- 10 km/h
- 10 PM
Another common use of the non-breaking space is to prevent browsers from truncating spaces in HTML pages.
If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them. To add real spaces to your text, you can use the
character entity.
The non-breaking hyphen ‑
is used to define a hyphen character (‑
) that does not break into a new line.
Some Useful HTML Character Entities
Result | Description | Entity Name | Entity Number |
---|---|---|---|
non-breaking space |   |   | |
< | less than | < | < |
> | greater than | > | > |
& | ampersand | & | & |
" | double quotation mark | " | " |
' | single quotation mark (apostrophe) | ' | ' |
¢ | cent | ¢ | ¢ |
£ | pound | £ | £ |
¥ | yen | ¥ | ¥ |
€ | euro | € | € |
© | copyright | © | © |
® | registered trademark | ® | ® |
Entity names are case sensitive.
Combining Diacritical Marks
A diacritical mark is a "glyph" added to a letter.
Some diacritical marks, like grave (`) and acute ( ́) are called accents.
Diacritical marks can appear both above and below a letter, inside a letter, and between two letters.
Diacritical marks can be used in combination with alphanumeric characters to produce a character that is not present in the character set (encoding) used in the page.
Here are some examples:
Mark | Character | Construct | Result |
---|---|---|---|
̀ | a | à | à |
́ | a | á | á |
̂ | a | â | â |
̃ | a | ã | ã |
̀ | O | Ò | Ò |
́ | O | Ó | Ó |
̂ | O | Ô | Ô |
̃ | O | Õ | Õ |
You will see more HTML symbols in the next chapter of this tutorial.