Special Characters

Certain characters, such as the left bracket (<), ampersand (&), etc. are reserved by HTML to represent special attributes such as the start of HTML elements, graphic characters, and so on. In addition there are many characters that you may wish to include in a document, but which are not trivially available on a standard keyboard.

HTML allows special referencing to represent these special characters. These are indicated by either character references or entity references. Both references are composed of three parts:

• a leading ampersand character, (&);
• either the decimal number corresponding to the character preceded by a numbers symbol, i.e., #xxxx (character reference) or the name of the entity in ascii characters (entity reference); and
• a terminating semicolon (;).