HTML Entities: Representing Special Characters
HTML, the foundation of web pages, uses specific characters for structuring content. However, certain characters have special meanings within HTML itself. This creates a conflict when you want to display those characters literally on a webpage. For example, the less-than sign (<) and greater-than sign (>) are used to define HTML tags. How do you display these signs themselves, without the browser interpreting them as tag delimiters? This is where HTML entities come in.
What are HTML Entities?
HTML entities are a standardized way to represent characters that either:
- Have a special meaning in HTML (like <, >, &, ", and ‘)
- Are difficult or impossible to type directly (like certain symbols or characters from other languages)
They allow you to display these characters safely and predictably on a web page.
The Less-Than and Greater-Than Entities
Specifically, < represents the less-than sign (<), and > represents the greater-than sign (>).
<(lt stands for "less than")>(gt stands for "greater than")
Why Use Entities?
Consider the following HTML snippet:
<p>This is less than that.</p>
If you wanted to display the actual less-than sign within that sentence, directly typing it would result in the browser misinterpreting it as the start of an HTML tag.
<p>This is < less than that.</p>
This would likely cause an error or render incorrectly. The correct way to display the less-than sign is using the entity:
<p>This is < less than that.</p>
This will correctly render the sentence as: "This is < less than that."
Other Common Entities
While < and > are frequently encountered, many other HTML entities exist. Here are a few more common examples:
&represents the ampersand (&)"represents the double quote (")'represents the apostrophe (‘)
Decimal and Hexadecimal Entities
In addition to named entities like <, you can also use decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references. For example, < and < both represent the less-than sign. This is particularly useful for characters that don’t have a named entity.
Resources
Using HTML entities ensures that your web pages display characters correctly and predictably, avoiding conflicts with HTML syntax.