HTML Entities

Jakob Jenkov
Last update: 2014-06-15

HTML is being used to write many different types of documents in many different languages. Therefore HTML documents may contain many different symbols that are not part of the standard english alphabet, or the ASCII table. The ASCII table is a table of the most commonly used letters and symbols in english.

To enable authors of HTML documents to include more symbols than are found in the ASCII table, and on their keyboard, HTML contains HTML entities. An HTML entity corresponds to a symbol or character.

HTML entities are written using normal ASCII characters. An HTML entity starts with the ampersand character & and finishes with the semicolon character ; . Between the ampersand and the semicolon you write the name of the HTML entity. Here is an example:

€

This HTML entity will be displayed in the browser as the EURO currency symbol: €

For a more comprehensive list of HTML entities, see Wikipedia's page on HTML entities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

Here is a list of the more commonly used HTML entities:

Entity Symbol Description
    Non-breakable space. Normally the browser ignores multiple consecutive spaces and displays only one space. However, non-breakable spaces are always displayed.
" " The quote character
' ' The apostrophe character
& & The ampersand character
&lt; < The less than character.
&gt; > The greater than character.
&pound; £ The pound symbol.
&euro; The EURO symbol.
&sect; § The section symbol.
&copy; © The copyright symbol.
&reg; © The registered sign symbol.
&trade; The trade mark symbol.

Jakob Jenkov

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