An HTML entity is a piece of text ("string") that begins with the ampersand (
&) character and ends with the semicolon (
;) character. Often, users employ entities to display characters that are normally interpreted as HTML code, invisible characters such as the non-breaking space, or characters that are difficult to type with a standard keyboard.
Many characters have memorable entities. For example, the entity for the copyright symbol (
©. For characters that don't have a memorable entity, you can use a numeric character reference, such as
—. To get the numeric character reference, you can use a tool.
HTML reserves four characters for its syntax:
- the ampersand
- the less-than sign
- the greater-than sign
- the straight double-quote character
Instead of displaying these characters as text, browsers interpret them according to special rules, or "parse" them. For instance, if you use the less-than (<) sign in HTML, the browser interprets the following text as a tag. To display the characters as text, known as "escaping" the characters, replace them with their corresponding character entities in the following table.
||Interpreted as the beginning of an entity or character reference.|
||Interpreted as the beginning of a tag|
||Interpreted as the ending of a tag|
||Interpreted as the beginning and end of an attribute's value.|