Certain characters are reserved for use in HTML (mainly < and >) and if you use them as content within a Web page the browser will become confused and think that they are part of a tag. Other characters may not be on your keyboard but you want to use them. If you use UTF-8 most normal characters (including those from most alphabets) will show properly but there will still be some problems.
To produce reserved characters (or those just not in your character set) you can use HTML entities. These are codes representing the characters:
- < (a less than symbol - <)
- > (a greater than symbol - >)
- (a space which will not be ignored by the browser - )
- © (a copyright symbol - ©)
- ° (a degree symbol - °)
- & (an ampersand - &)
- £ (a UK pound sterling symbol - £)
- " (double quotes - ")
Type the code where you want the symbol to appear in the text.
All entities start with an ampersand (&) so that is a reserved character like < and >.
As you can see many entities can be guessed at because they include an abbreviation for the symbol. If there is no symbol for the character you want you can use a numeric code such as < for less than.
To find the numeric codes just search for html entities.
