HTML Entities

Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities.

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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;

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).

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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.

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HTML Entities Example

Experiment with HTML character entities: Try it yourself

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HTML Useful Character Entities

Note: Entity names are case sensitive!

Result	Description	Entity Name	Entity Number
	non-breaking space	 	 
<	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.