HTML Entities

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Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities.

Characters, not present on your keyboard, can also be replaced by entities.

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HTML Entities

Some characters are reserved in HTML.

If you use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, the browser might mix them with tags.

Character entities are used to display reserved characters in HTML.

A character entity looks like this:

To display a less than sign we must write: &lt; or &#60;

	The advantage of using an entity name, instead of a number, is that the name is easier to remember. The disadvantage is that browsers may not support all entity names, but the support for numbers is good.

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Non-breaking Space

A common character entity used in HTML is the non-breaking space: &nbsp;

A non-breaking space is a space that will not break into a new line.

Two words separated by a non-breaking space will stick together at the end of a line. This is handy when breaking the words might be disruptive.

Examples:

• � 10
• 10 m/s
• 10 km/h
• 10 PM

Another common use of the non-breaking space is to prevent that browsers truncate spaces in HTML pages.

If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them. To add real spaces to your text, you can use the &nbsp; character entity.

	The non-breaking hyphen (‑) lets you use a hyphen character that won't break.

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Some Other Useful HTML Character Entities

Result	Description	Entity Name	Entity Number
	non-breaking space	 	 
<	less than	&lt;	&#60;
>	greater than	&gt;	&#62;
&	ampersand	&amp;	&#38;
¢	cent	&cent;	&#162;
£	pound	&pound;	&#163;
¥	yen	&yen;	&#165;
€	euro	&euro;	&#8364;
©	copyright	&copy;	&#169;
®	registered trademark	&reg;	&#174;

	Entity names are case sensitive.

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Combining Diacritical Marks

A diacritical mark is a "glyph" added to a letter.

Some diacritical marks, like grave (  ̀) and acute (  ́) are called accents.

Diacritical marks can appear both above and below a letter, inside a letter, and between two letters.

Diacritical marks can be used in combination with alphanumeric characters, to produce a character that is not present in the character set (encoding) used in the page.

Here are some examples:

Mark	Character	Construct	Result
̀	a	à	à
́	a	á	á
̂	a	â	â
̃	a	ã	ã
̀	O	Ò	Ò
́	O	Ó	Ó
̂	O	Ô	Ô
̃	O	Õ	Õ

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You will see more HTML symbols in the next chapter of this tutorial.