HTML entities are used to represent reserved characters, invisible characters, accented characters, international characters, mathematical symbols, icons, etc., in HTML. These entities start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;).
Below are the steps on how to use HTML entities:
1. Reserved characters: For example, less than (<) and greater than (>) are reserved in HTML. If you use these characters in your text, the browser might mix them with tags. To ensure they display correctly, you can use entities “<” and “>” respectively.
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< and >
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1. Non-breaking space: Non-breaking spaces can be written as “ ” in HTML. These spaces are not condensed by HTML, unlike normal spaces.
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Use of HTML entities
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1. Display characters: To display characters like ampersand (&), quotes (“), you should use their corresponding HTML entities – “&”, “"” respectively.
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Use of & and "
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1. Special characters: Similarly, other special characters or symbols can be written using entities. For example, the copyright symbol (©) can be written as “©.”
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Use of ©
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1. Unicode Entities: Unicode is a specification that aims to list every character used by human languages and assigns them a unique number. These numbers can be used in HTML with the following format: `&#` followed by the Unicode number, then a semicolon `;`
For example, to represent a heart symbol (❤️), we can use: `❤`.
These entities can be used directly in the content of any element in your HTML.
There are hundreds of HTML entities, many of which represent special or non-English characters. To identify the correct entity for the specific character you needed, you might need to look up for an “HTML entities chart” or “HTML entities reference” on the internet.
