The French phrase for How are you?
is Ça va?
. The German phrase for Who are you?
is Wie heißt du?
And Russian for I speak Russian
is Я говорю на русском языке
. Each phrase uses letters not found on the standard QWERTY keyboard.
And if you want to show HTML code, you can’t use the standard greater-than or less-than signs as you see them on your keyboard; your browser will read that as actual markup.
So how does one make these characters show up on a screen? The answer is a type of code called an entity.
How To Create An Entity
Every entity starts and ends with specific characters. The character that starts an entity is the ampersand, or &
. Omit this, and your code will not become a single character. The character that ends the entity is the semicolon (;
). Omit this, and your browser will be confused about where the entity code is supposed to end, and you might get a character or simply the code as plain text.
To demonstrate this, I’ll show three very common characters by using entities.
- <
- Entity code: <
- >
- Entity code: >
- &
- Entity code: &
The above entities are recognized no matter what the markup language.
For a complete list of entities (this is VERY handy) refer to this website.