HTML Entities & Special Characters

A few characters are part of HTML's own syntax. < starts a tag, & starts an entity, and " delimits an attribute value. If you type those literally as content, the browser tries to read them as markup instead of showing them.

An entity is the escaped form of such a character. Every entity starts with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon, like < for < or & for &. You write the entity, and the browser renders the single real character.

The classic version of this bug is trying to show a code example in a tutorial. You type The <strong> tag and the word and its brackets vanish, because the browser turned <strong> into a real element. Entities are how you put literal HTML, math, and symbols on the page as text.

It is also a correctness issue in everyday content. An unescaped ampersand in a sentence or a URL can quietly confuse the parser, so knowing which characters to escape keeps your text reliable.

To show a reserved character as text, replace it with its entity: < becomes <, > becomes >, and & becomes &. Inside an attribute value you also escape the matching quote with " or '. The ampersand is the one people forget, and it is the most important, because it is what begins every entity.

Entities come in two forms. A named entity like © is easy to read, but not every character has a name. A numeric entity works for any Unicode character at all: decimal © or hexadecimal © both render the copyright sign, exactly like ©.

  is a special one: a non-breaking space that keeps two words or a label and its value from splitting across lines, like Price: 999. Beyond these, because your files are UTF-8, you can usually just type symbols such as the copyright sign, arrows, or the euro directly and they render fine.