Inserting Special Characters

If you start creating web pages, sooner or later you will find the need to insert characters that do not seem to exist in the HTML character set. For example, just try to put a less than sign on your page. It will not work, because HTML believes the < is the start of a tag. Thus, you cannot have one in your text.

So let's say you do want to insert a less than sign "<" in your document. How do you do that?

You use something called Escape Sequences. An escape sequence (these are defined by the ISO 8879 standard) is a set of characters to tell the browser to insert a single special character in the document.

Using this method, you can insert over a hundred different special characters. It's understood by virtually all browsers (including email) and is very common. The newer Unicode standard (ISO/IEC 10646) is far more powerful (allowing for billions of different characters) but far more complicated and only supported by modern browsers.

Okay, enough of that. You just want to insert a less than sign, after all.

To begin, you enter a character telling HTML that you are starting a special character sequence. This special character is the ampersand, &, and it begins the sequence. Next, you include a few characters (or a name) to tell HTML what character you want, then you finish with a semi-colon to indicate you are finished.

The greater than sign is thus represented as &gt; and the less than sign is &lt;

Simple, eh?

Let's look at another example. Some words use a special symbol called an umlaut, which is two dots over over the character. For example, ü. To represent this character, simply add &#252; to your document.

You can look at Escape Sequences to get a list of all of the escape sequences that you can use.