• Some characters are reserved in HTML.

• If you use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, the browser might mix them with tags. To display a less than sign (<) we must write: &It; or <

• Character entities are used to display reserved characters in HTML.

• A character entity looks like this:

&entity_name;

OR

&#entity_number;

Non-breaking Space

• A commonly used entity in HTML is the non-breaking space:

• A non-breaking space is a space that will not break into a new line.

• Two words separated by a non-breaking space will stick together (not break into a new line). This is handy when breaking the words might be disruptive.

• Examples:

10 km/h

10 PM

• Another common use of the non-breaking space is to prevent browsers from truncating spaces in HTML pages.

• If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them. To add real spaces to your text, you can use the character entity.

Some very useful Character Entities

Example:

Combining Diacritical Marks

• A diacritical mark is a "glyph" added to a letter.

• Some diacritical marks, like grave (`) and acute (`) are called accents.

• Diacritical marks can appear both above and below a letter, inside a letter, and between two letters.

• Diacritical marks can be used in combination with alphanumeric characters to produce a character that is not present in the character set (encoding) used on the page.

Example: