Character entity

A character entity is a method of producing characters, such as reserved HTML code characters (quote, less than, greater than, and ampersand) and many ISO-Latin 1 characters that you may want to include in a document, but which are not available on a standard keyboard. For example, "&lt;" represents the character "<" - less than, and "&egrave;" represents the character "è" - egrave.

Numeric entities are another method of character reproduction.

URLs:

Special Characters in HTML

A page from an online HTML document about character entities.

HTML Character Entities

Dealing with Macintosh's unsupported HTML character entities.

Special Characters

How to hardcode special characters. (Note: using entities is the preferred method of special character reproduction.)

W3E References:

ISOLATIN.txt

A list of the ISO Latin numeric and character entities.

Creating HTML documents

When writing HTML documents, character entities must be used for many symbols and characters in order to display them in a Web page.

Detail:

Character entities take the form of &string;, which is composed of three required parts:

• a leading ampersand character: "&",
• the text string assigned to the desired symbol or character.
• a terminating semicolon ";".

Characters which are used to construct HTML tags and entities must also be represented as entities:

Character                    entity
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Less-than sign (<)          &lt;
Greater-than sign (>)       &gt;
Ampersand (&)               &amp;
Double quote (")            &quot;