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Introduction to HTML

Special Characters

Because the less than symbol is special (it starts a tag) you can't type it in as a simple character. So -- what if you just want the character? The answer is to use entity references. THis is an HTML mechanisms for entering these special characters using special codes. The following table shows the special codes on the left, and the resulting character on the right

&lt; <
&gt; >
&quot; "
&amp; &

The special references begin with the ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon. Becasue this makes the ampersand special, you need to use the special &amp; reference to actually type an ampersand.

Latin Characters

There are also a lot of special references for accented and other special characters commonly used in western European languages. A list of these is found at:

http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/Book/Book-3ed/appa/en_test.html ... @

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