HTML Entities

Characters the markup already uses

HTML source is text, but a few characters are not ordinary text. The parser treats< as “a tag starts here” and & as “an entity starts here.” If you want those characters to appear on the page, you write an entity — a short name the parser turns into the real character after it has finished reading tags.

An entity starts with & and ends with ;. Named entities such as< are easy to remember. Numeric entities such as © work too. Beginners can stay with the named set in the table below.

Why a raw less-than breaks the parser

Suppose you want the sentence “If score is 5 < 10, you pass.” If you type a real< into the paragraph, the browser does not see a comparison. It sees the start of a tag named “ 10, you pass.” That is not a valid tag, so the rest of the paragraph can vanish, wrap oddly, or swallow following markup.

<p>If the score is 5 < 10, you pass.</p>
<p>Tom & Jerry play piano.</p>

The first line starts a malformed tag at < 10. The second line starts an entity at& that never ends, so Jerry can be eaten or shown incorrectly. Always encode these two in text: less-than as <, ampersand as &.

Source versus rendered

The live preview at /html/try shows the rendered page, not the entity names. In the editor you type ©. On the page you see ©. That gap is the whole point of entities.

<p>If the score is 5 &lt; 10, you pass.</p>
<p>Tom &amp; Jerry play piano.</p>
<p>5 &gt; 2 is also true.</p>
<p>He said &quot;open early.&quot;</p>
<p>Copyright &copy; 2026 Eastside Bakery.</p>
<p>Keep&nbsp;this&nbsp;together on one line.</p>

The same file paints as:

The entities you will type daily

To show HTML tags in a tutorial, you encode both brackets: <p> renders as<p>. Never put a raw <p> in the middle of a sentence unless you intend to start a paragraph element.

Non-breaking space

A normal space is a wrap opportunity. The browser may split “10 km” so that “10” ends one line and “km” starts the next.   is a space that refuses to break. Use it for units, initials, and short phrases you want to keep on one line — not as a way to indent paragraphs.

<p>The loaf weighs 900&nbsp;g.</p>
<p>Meet at 14&nbsp;Harbor Lane.</p>
<p>Chapter&nbsp;4 is the forms track.</p>

Quotes, copyright, and attributes

Inside element content, a straight " is usually fine. Inside an attribute that is already wrapped in double quotes, a raw " would end the attribute early. Write" or switch the attribute to single quotes.

• © is © — typical in a footer: Copyright © 2026.
• " is " — typical in title="He said "hello"".
• You can also write curly quotes as characters if the file is UTF-8. Entities are required only when the character would confuse the parser.

Ampersand is the one people forget in URLs pasted as text: a=1&b=2 in a paragraph. In a real href you still encode it: href="search?a=1&b=2".

What to remember

• A raw < in text starts a tag. Write < instead.
• A raw & starts an entity. Write & for a real ampersand.
•   is a space that will not wrap. © is ©. " is a double quote.
• The editor shows source. The preview shows characters. Both views are correct.

Next: the character set. UTF-8 is how the file stores José, Søren, and every other letter the web uses.