💱HTML special characters

adding non-alphanumeric text

At least two kinds of special characters exist in HTML:

  • Entities

    • characters which do not appear on all keyboards; or

    • characters that would interfere with HTML code such as < and >

  • Emoji

    • icons that no longer consist of image files but text-like characters 😁

Entities

There are two ways to encode entities:

&lt; <!-- "less than" - encoding by "name" -->
&#60; <!-- "less than" - encoding by "#number" -->

Common entities include:

Appearance
Meaning
By name
By number

non-breaking space*

&nbsp;

&#160;

<

less than

&lt;

&#60;

>

greater than

&gt;

&#62;

&

ampersand

&amp;

&#38;

¢

cent

&cent;

&#162;

€

euro

&euro;

&#8364;

£

pound

&pound;

&#163;

©

copyright

&copy;

&#169;

®

registered trademark

&reg;

&#174;

™

trademark

&trade;

&#8482;

Remember that when HTML entities by name are case sensitive!

i.e. &euro; will work but not &Euro;

Emoji

Emoji are just symbols like $ or ¢ and we can simply input them using:

  • an emoji keyboard (control + command + space on a Mac)

  • HTML entity code (such as &#128516 for 😄)

We also need to ensure that the <head> contains this line of code for emoji to appear on the page: 

...
<head>
    ...
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    ...
</head>
...

Fun fact: Emoji is the plural of emoji!

Another fun fact: The resemblance of the word "emoji" to "emotion" is a complete coincidence!

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