HTML Character Entities

We have now established that you open and close tags using the less-than and greater-then symbols. But what if you wanted to use these characters in your web page, without the browser trying to format it correctly.

Say you have a financial site and you enclose all your stock ticker symbols in these tags(i.e <GOOG>). How does the browser know what is and what isn't a tag? Simple we use an alternative set of symbols for the characters HTML uses.

Character Entity Syntax

& - starts with an amperstand
copy - name of entity
; - ends with a semicolon 

Example:

©

would output:

©

List of Popular Character Entities

• &nbsp;           no-break space
• &iexcl;      ¡      inverted exclamation mark
• &cent;      ¢     cent sign
• &pound;  £     pound sterling sign
• &yen;       ¥     yen sign
• &sect;      §     section sign
• &copy;     ©    copyright sign
• &reg;       ®     registered sign
• &quot;      "      quotation mark
• &amp;     &     ampersand
• &lt;           <      less-than sign
• &gt;          >     greater-than sign

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