Character Entities in HTML & XHTML

Single characters can be embedded into documents using character entity references. These references have a numeric value as well as a named value. You can use either one just so long as it is allowed within the DTD in question.

Using character entities is particularly helpful when the encoding set doesn't express all the characters that you might want to use in the document. For example, if I were authoring a document in English and wanted to use an inverted exclamation mark for a Spanish quotation, I'd use an entity to create that character. Other character entity references help control space, symbols, and so on.

There are three types of character entities available in HTML and XHTML. Follow the links to the complete chart listings for that entity type.

• ISO 8859-1 characters. This set includes the Latin set of character entities.
• Symbols, Mathematical Characters, Greek and Latin Letters. This set includes entities for various symbols (such as copyright symbols and so on), math characters, and Greek and Latin letters.
• Markup-significant Characters . This set includes internationalization characters such as those required for bi-directional text.