Section A.2. HTML Character Entities

A.2. HTML Character Entities

HTML character entities are codes you can enter in a page that are then translated into other characters by the browser before they're displayed. All HTML character entities start with the ampersand (&) and end with the semicolon (;).

There are two reasons you might want to use HTML character entities. First of all, you might want to use a character that is considered to have a special meaning in the HTML standard. For example, if you type < in an HTML document, the browser assumes you're starting a tag, which makes it difficult to write a pithy bit of logic like "2 < 3." To get around this, you can replace the < symbol with a character entity that represents the less-than symbol. The browser will then insert what you want when it displays the page.

The other reason you might use HTML character entities is because you want to use a special character that's not easy to type, like an accented letter or a currency symbol. In fact, it's quite possibly not on your keyboard at all.

Table A-2 has the most commonly used HTML entities. For the complete list, which includes many more international language characters, see http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/special_characters.

Table A-3. HTML Character Entities

Character	Name of Character	What to Type
<	Less than	&lt;
>	Greater than	&gt;
&	Ampersand	&amp;
"	Quotation mark	&quot;
	Copyright	&copy;
	Registered trademark	&reg;
	Cent sign	&cent;
& pound ;	Pound sterling	&pound;
	Yen sign	&yen;
	Euro sign	&euro; (but &#8364; is better supported)
°	Degree sign	&deg;
±	Plus or minus	&plusmn;
·	Division sign	&divide;
x	Multiply sign	&times;
µ	Micro sign	&micro;
¼	Fraction one-fourth	&frac14;
½	Fraction one-half	&frac12;
¾	Fraction three-fourths	&frac34;
	Paragraph sign	&para;
§	Section sign	&sect;
«	Left angle quote, guillemotleft	&laquo;
»	Right angle quote, guillemotright	&raquo;
	Inverted exclamation	&iexcl;
	Inverted question mark	&iquest;
	Small ae diphthong (ligature)	&aelig;
§	Small c, cedilla	&ccedil;
	Small e, grave accent	&egrave;
	Small e, acute accent	&eacute;
	Small e, circumflex accent	&ecirc;
«	Small e, dieresis or umlaut mark	&euml;
	Small o, dieresis or umlaut mark	&ouml;
‰	Capital E, acute accent	&Eacute;