Entities of HTML Character

HTML defines a lot of elements for formatting output, like bold or italic text.

• Some characters like the < character, have a special meaning in HTML, and therefore cannot be used in the text.
• To display a less than sign (<) in HTML, we have to use a character entity.

Character Entities

• Some characters have a special meaning in HTML, like the less than sign (<) that defines the start of an HTML tag. If we want the browser to actually display these characters we must insert character entities in the HTML source.
• A character entity has three parts: an ampersand (&), an entity name or a # and an entity number, and finally a semicolon (;).
• To display a less than sign in an HTML document we must write: < or <
• The advantage of using a name instead of a number is that a name is easier to remember. The disadvantage is that not all browsers support the newest entity names, while the support for entity numbers is very good in almost all browsers.
• Note that the entities are case sensitive.

Common HTML Character Entities:

Description Entity Name Entity Number
• non-breaking space    
• < less than < <
• > greater than > >
• & ampersand & &
• ” quotation mark " "
• ‘ apostrophe ' (does not work in IE) '