19. HTML Entities

What you will learn

• What an HTML entity is
• Why some characters must be written as entities
• The most useful entities
• How to show HTML code on a page

Why entities exist

Some characters have a special meaning in HTML. The less-than sign < starts a tag. If you type it in your text, the browser may think a tag is beginning. To show these characters safely, you write an entity instead.

Entity syntax

An entity begins with an ampersand (&) and ends with a semicolon (;). You can use a name or a number:

&entity_name;
&#entity_number;

Common entities

Showing code on a page

To display a tag as text, replace < with < and > with >. Every code example in this tutorial is written this way.

<p>Use the &lt;p&gt; element for paragraphs.</p>
<p>5 &lt; 10 and 10 &gt; 5</p>
<p>&copy; 2026 BeingXpert</p>

The non-breaking space

Browsers collapse several spaces into one. A non-breaking space ( ) stays put, and it also stops a line from breaking between two words. This is useful for keeping a number and its unit together, such as 10 km.

Do you always need entities?

If your file is saved as UTF-8 and has <meta charset="UTF-8">, you can type characters such as © or € directly. You still need entities for <, >, and &, because they have special meaning in HTML.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting the semicolon at the end, such as &copy.
• Typing a bare < in text and finding that part of the page disappears.
• Misspelling the entity name. The browser then shows the raw text.
• Using   repeatedly to indent text.

<p>Use &lt;br&gt; for a line break</p>

Summary

• Entities let you show reserved and special characters.
• They use the form &name; or &#number;.
• Use <, >, and & to display code.