How to use HTML Entities | Complete list of HTML entities | HTML KICK

How to use HTML entities

Character entities allow users to include characters that cannot be entered using a keyboard or those that are reserved in the HTML language. The table below shows commonly used entities and the characters they represent.

It is better to use the numerical references instead of entity names because of compatibility issues. Also note that entities are case sensitive.

Entities are used to implement reserved characters or to express characters that cannot easily be entered with the keyboard.

ISO-8859-1 is the default character set in most browsers.

The first 128 characters of ISO-8859-1 is the original ASCII character-set (the numbers from 0-9, the uppercase and lowercase English alphabet, and some special characters).

The higher part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 160-255) contains the characters used in Western European countries and some commonly used special characters.

The HTML Symbol Entities include mathematical symbols, Greek characters, various arrows, technical symbols and shapes.

It is worth noting that Entity Names are case sensitive.

Notation of Entities:

A character entity reference consists of an ampersand (&), followed by a pound sign (#), the number of the character entity, and finishing with a semi-colon (;). Alternately, for some characters you can put ampersand, the name of the character (but no # sign), followed by a semi-colon.

Areas of Entities:

There are various categories, where HTML Entities are used:

• Entities for mathematical and technical characters (including Greek) i.e. ?
• Entities for punctuation characters i.e. ?
• Entities for accented characters, accents, and other diacritics from Western European Languages i.e. ?
• Entities for characters with special meaning in HTML. i.e. &
• Entities for shapes and arrows i.e. ->

What is Elements in HTML5?

Entity Names

Entity names use letters to specify which entity to use.

So?©?is an example of using the entity name.

However, not all Unicode characters have a corresponding entity name (as you can see in the above list). However, all Unicode characters are assigned a hexadecimal number which is unique to that character. So if you don’t see an entity name for a character, use the hexadecimal or decimal value instead.

Numeric Character References

You can also use numeric character references to write character entities (as seen by the examples above).

Numeric character references include a hash (#) after the ampersand, followed by some numbers, and ending with a semicolon (;).

Numeric character references can be defined with either a decimal or hexadecimal value. The numeric character reference for the copyright symbol is?©?(decimal) and?©?(hexadecimal).