HTML Entities

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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:

&entity_name;

&#entity_number;

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.

Tip: 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	Try it
	non-breaking space			Try it »
<	less than	<	<	Try it »
>	greater than	>	>	Try it »
&	ampersand	&	&	Try it »
"	double quotation mark	"	"	Try it »
'	single quotation mark (apostrophe)	'	'	Try it »
¢	cent	¢	¢	Try it »
£	pound	£	£	Try it »
¥	yen	¥	¥	Try it »
€	euro	€	€	Try it »
©	copyright	©	©	Try it »
®	registered trademark	®	®	Try it »

Note: 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: