Tuesday, August 14, 2012

HTML Entities

Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities.

HTML Entities

Some characters are reserved in HTML.
It is not possible to use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, because the browser will mix them with tags.
To actually display reserved characters, we must use character entities in the HTML source code.
A character entity looks like this:
&entity_name; OR
&#entity_number;
 
To display a less than sign we must write: &lt; or &#60;

Remark Tip: The advantage of using an entity name, instead of a number, is that the name is easier to remember. However, the disadvantage is that browsers may not support all entity names (the support for entity numbers is very good).



Non-breaking Space

A common character entity used in HTML is the non-breaking space (&nbsp;).
Browsers will always truncate spaces in HTML pages. If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them, before displaying the page. To add spaces to your text, you can use the &nbsp; character entity.

HTML Entities Example

Experiment with HTML character entities: Try it yourself

HTML Useful Character Entities

Note: Entity names are case sensitive!

ResultDescriptionEntity NameEntity Number
 non-breaking space&nbsp;&#160;
<less than&lt;&#60;
>greater than&gt;&#62;
&ampersand&amp;&#38;
¢cent&cent;&#162;
£pound&pound;&#163;
¥yen&yen;&#165;
euro&euro;&#8364;
§section&sect;&#167;
©copyright&copy;&#169;
®registered trademark&reg;&#174;
trademark&trade;&#8482;


For a complete reference of all character entities, visit our HTML Entities Reference.

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