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.................... Introduction to HTML

4.15 Special Characters --
Character and Entity References

Certain characters, such as the left bracket (<), ampersand (&), etc. are reserved by HTML to represent special attributes such as the start of HTML elements, graphic characters, and so on. In addition there are many ISO-Latin 1 characters that you may wish to include in a document, but which are not trivially available on a standard keyboard.

HTML allows special referencing to represent these special characters. These are indicated by either character references or entity references.

4.15.1 Character References

Character references are composed of three parts: Thus the character reference for less than symbol (<) is &#60;.

4.15.2 Entity References

Entity references are similar, but use symbolic names to represent the characters. Entity references also have three parts: Thus the entity reference for less than symbol (<) is &lt;.

4.15.3 Beware of Certain Entity References!

Note that, in HTML 2, not all the valid characters have corresponding entity references. In theses cases you must used the direct numerical character references. HTML 3 attempted to rectify this, but many of the newer entity references are not understood by all browsers (these entity references are shown, in the data table slightly indented and in an italics font.

The attached document gives a list of all the ISO Latin-1 characters, showing the numeric decimal codes and the entity references (if they are defined).

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© Ian Graham 1994-1995 Page Last Updated: 4 December 1995