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 😁

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*

 

less than

<

greater than

>

ampersand

&

cent

¢

€

euro

€

pound

£

©

registered trademark

®

™

trademark

™

Remember that when HTML entities by name are case sensitive!

i.e. € will work but not &Euro;

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

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 !

Last updated 2 months ago