Entities (text)

Special characters may be inserted into text using HTML syntax. Such characters are known as entities. They start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. The main reason for doing this is to insert characters that otherwise have a special meaning. The most common entities have names. The rest must be referred to by their ASCII number (e.g. &amp;#38; is the same as &amp;amp;). The common ones are listed in the following table. Note that the same effect may be achieved by simply escaping the special character (like ). The full entity syntax is included for generality.

&amp; &lt; &gt; &quot; &copy;