HTML Entities & Characters

In HTML, some characters are reserved. For example, you cannot use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs directly in your text because the browser will mistake them for tags.

To display these characters, we use HTML Entities.

An HTML entity looks like this: &entity_name; OR &#entity_number;.

A diacritical mark is a "glyph" added to a letter. Some diacritical marks, like grave (ò) and acute (ó), are called accents. You can create these by adding the entity number after the letter.

Try writing the sentence: "The standard syntax for a tag is " in an HTML file. Use entities for the brackets so the browser doesn't try to render <tagname> as a real element.

A: We need entities to display reserved characters (like < and >) that the browser would otherwise interpret as HTML code, and to display characters not present on a standard keyboard (like © or €).

A: A regular space can be collapsed by the browser or used as a line-break point.   (Non-Breaking Space) forces the browser to keep the space and prevents a line break from occurring at that position.

A: You should use the entity &. Using a raw & can sometimes cause validation errors or be misinterpreted if followed by characters that look like an entity name.