Please visit our sponsors !

HTML Character Entities

Some characters like the < character, have a special meaning in HTML, and therefore cannot be used in the text.

To display a less than sign (<) in HTML, we have to use a character entity.

Character Entities

Some characters have a special meaning in HTML, like the less than sign (<) that defines the start of an HTML tag. If we want the browser to actually display these characters we must insert character entities in the HTML source.

A character entity has three parts: an ampersand (&), an entity name or a # and an entity number, and finally a semicolon (;).

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

The advantage of using a name instead of a number is that a name is easier to remember. The disadvantage is that not all browsers support the newest entity names, while the support for entity numbers is very good in almost all browsers.

Note that the entities are case sensitive. 

This example lets you experiment with character entities: Character Entities

Non-breaking Space

The most common character entity in HTML is the non-breaking space.

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

The Most Common Character Entities:

Some Other Commonly Used Character Entities:

To see a full list of HTML character entities go to our HTML Entities Reference.

Jump to: Top of Page or HOME or Printer friendly page

Search W3Schools:

What Others Say About Us

Does the world know about us? Check out these places:

Dogpile Alta Vista MSN Google Excite Lycos Yahoo Ask Jeeves

We Help You For Free. You Can Help Us!

• Tell your newsgroup or mailing list
• Link to us from your pages
• Help us correct errors and broken links
• Help us with spelling and grammar
• Validate the XHTML code of this page

W3Schools is for training only. We do not warrant its correctness or its fitness for use. The risk of using it remains entirely with the user. While using this site, you agree to have read and accepted our terms of use and privacy policy.

Copyright 1999-2002 by Refsnes Data. All Rights Reserved

How we converted to XHTML