HTML Entities

HTML entities offer methods to display reserved characters, ensuring correct rendering. Reserved characters, like ‘<‘, can create ambiguity if not displayed properly. HTML provides entity names and numbers for symbols not on basic keyboards (e.g., £, ¥, €, ©), resolving ambiguity and enabling accurate display.

Syntax

&entity_name; or & #entity_number;

Note: Entity names are case-sensitive.

Entity Name and Entity Number

Some useful Symbols with their Entity name and Entity numbers are listed below:

Example: In this example we displays various currency symbols using entity representations.

Output:

Reserved Characters

These characters are either reserved for HTML or those which are not present in the basic keyboard & can’t use them directly. Some of the reserved characters representations are given below:

Other Characters

Some characters that aren’t available directly on our keyboard, therefore such an entity can be used to represent it by using their entity number. These keywords are directly not available to type, we need to specify their entity number. Here #x before the numbers represents the hexadecimal representation.

Example: Illustration of the use of special characters that are directly not available to type from the keyboard.

Output:

Advantages and Disadvantages of HTML Entity

Advantages

• Entity names can be easy to remember.

Disadvantages

• Browsers might not support all the entity names, instead, they can support the use of entity numbers.

Non-breaking Space

It is used to provide space that will not break into a new line. This HTML entity is represented by &nbsp; that will separate the 2 words & will stick together without breaking it into a new line. We can also use the non-breaking space for preventing the browsers from truncating spaces in HTML pages. The non-breaking hyphen (‑) is used to define a hyphen character (‑) that does not break into a new line.

Example

• 12:00 PM
• 256 km/h

If we use to write 10 spaces in our text, then the browser will remove 9 of them. In order to add real spaces in our text, we can use the character entity.

Combining Diacritical Marks

A diacritical mark is a “glyph” added to a letter. Diacritical marks like grave ( ` ̀) and acute ( ́ ) are called accents. It can appear both above and below a letter, inside a letter, and between two letters. Diacritical marks can be used in combination with alphanumeric characters to generate a character that is not present in the character set (encoding) used on the page. Here is the list of some diacritical marks.

• Google Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox
• Opera
• Safari