Special characters may be inserted into text using HTML syntax. Such characters are known as entities. They start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. The main reason for doing this is to insert characters that otherwise have a special meaning. The most common entities have names. The rest must be referred to by their Unicode character number (e.g. & is the same as &). The common ones are listed in the following table. Note that the same effect may be achieved by simply escaping the special character (like <). The full entity syntax is included for generality.
| Entity | Character |
|---|---|
| & | & |
| < | < |
| > | > |
| " | " |
| © | © |
When using numbered entities, you can put an x in front of the number to use hexadecimal. For instance &, &, and & are all equivalent.