Some characters are reserved in HTML.

It is not possible to use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, because the browser will mix them with tags.

To actually display reserved characters, we must use character entities in the HTML source code.

A character entity looks like this:

To display a less than sign we must write: &lt; or &#60;

[img border="0" src="http://www.w3schools.com/images/lamp.gif" alt="Remark">Tip: The advantage of using an entity name, instead of a number, is that the name is easier to remember. However, the disadvantage is that browsers may not support all entity names (the support for entity numbers is very good).

A common character entity used in HTML is the non-breaking space (&nbsp;).

Browsers will always truncate spaces in HTML pages. If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them, before displaying the page. To add spaces to your text, you can use the &nbsp; character entity.

HTML Entities Example

Experiment with HTML character entities: Try it yourself

HTML Useful Character Entities

Note: Entity names are case sensitive!

For a complete reference of all character entities, visit our HTML Entities Reference.