HTML Entities
What does HTML Entities mean?
Definition
HTML entities are special character codes that are used in HTML and XML to represent characters that cannot be easily typed on a keyboard, such as symbols and special characters. They are also used to represent characters that have a special meaning in HTML or XML, such as the "<" and "&" characters, which are used to delimit HTML tags and entities, respectively.
HTML entities are represented by a string of characters that start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;), with the entity name or number code in between. For example, the entity for the copyright symbol is "©". When the HTML or XML document is processed by a web browser or other software, the entity is replaced with the corresponding character. This allows authors to include symbols and special characters in their HTML or XML documents without having to worry about the character encoding used by the recipient.
There are two types of HTML entities: named entities, which are represented by a string of characters, and numerical entities, which are represented by a number code. The most commonly used HTML entities are the named entities, but numerical entities are also supported for compatibility with other character encoding standards.