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Entity

An HTML entity is a piece of text ("string") that begins with an ampersand (& ) and ends with a semicolon (; ). HTML entities are frequently used to display reserved characters (which would otherwise be interpreted as HTML code), and invisible characters (like non-breaking spaces). You can also use HTML character entities in place of other characters that are difficult to type with a standard keyboard.

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Entity

Note: Many characters have memorable entities. For example, the entity for the copyright symbol (© ) is © . For less memorable characters, such as — or — , you can use a reference chart or decoder tool .

Reserved characters

Some special characters are reserved for use in HTML, meaning that your browser will parse them as HTML code. For example, if you use the less-than (< ) sign, the browser interprets any text that follows as a tag .

To display these characters as text, replace them with their corresponding character entities, as shown in the following table.

Character Entity Note
& &amp; Interpreted as the beginning of an entity or character reference.
< &lt; Interpreted as the beginning of a tag
> &gt; Interpreted as the ending of a tag
" &quot; Interpreted as the beginning and end of an attribute 's value.
&nbsp; Interpreted as the non breaking space.
– &ndash; Interpreted as the en dash (half the width of an em unit).
— &mdash; Interpreted as the em dash (equal to width of an "m" character).
© &copy; Interpreted as the copyright sign.
® &reg; Interpreted as the registered sign.
™ &trade; Interpreted as the trademark sign.
≈ &asymp; Interpreted as almost equal to sign.
≠ &ne; Interpreted as not equal to sign.
£ &pound; Interpreted as the pound symbol.
€ &euro; Interpreted as the euro symbol.
° &deg; Interpreted as the degree symbol.

See also

Updated on April 20, 2024 by Datarist.