HTML Entities — Special Characters Reference

Entities

Entities are used as a replacement of reserved characters in HTML document. Characters which are not present on the keyboard, can also be replace by entities. For example, if we use the symbol < or > in our HTML document, then the browser might mix these symbol with tags. Thats why we use entities to display reserved characters. Below is a list of important and most commonly used entities-

Entity	Description	Numerical Reference	Result
	Non-breaking space
<	Less than	<	<
>	Greater than	>	>
&	Ampersand	&	&
"	Double quotation mark	"	"
'	Single quotation mark (apostrophe)	'	'
&dollar;	Dollar	$	$
¢	Cent	¢	¢
£	Pound	£	£
©	Copyright	©	©
®	Registered trademark	®	®

More Useful HTML Entities

Entity	Description	Result
`™`	Trademark	™
`€`	Euro sign	€
`—`	Em dash	—
`×`	Multiplication sign	×
`°`	Degree symbol	°
`±`	Plus-minus sign	±

Entities in Practice

Entities in HTML

<!-- Copyright footer -->
<footer>&copy; 2024 Tutorials Logic. All rights reserved.</footer>

<!-- Non-breaking space -->
<p>10&nbsp;km</p>

<!-- Math expressions -->
<p>Temperature: 37&deg;C</p>
<p>Result: 5 &times; 3 = 15</p>

Key Takeaways

Always use < and > to display < and > in HTML.
  creates a non-breaking space - useful between numbers and units.
HTML entities can be written as named (©), decimal (©), or hexadecimal (©) references.
Use & to display a literal ampersand (&) in HTML.
Entities are essential when displaying code examples in HTML.
Modern HTML5 with UTF-8 encoding supports most Unicode characters directly.