4. Entities

Some characters are not displayed by XHTML user agents, either because they have a special meaning in XHTML (e.g. square brackets, "<" e ">", which enclose tag names) or because they don't belong to the character set of the document, e.g. greek or mathematical symbols.

Therefore, these characters must be represented through entities, which allow you to display special characters by using any of the following special sequences:

• ampersand, a mnemonic string, semi colon (e.g. ∞);
• ampersand, hash mark, a decimal value, semi colon (e.g. ∞);
• ampersand, hash mark, "x", a hex value, semi colon (e.g. ∞);

XHTML 1.0 defines three groups of entities:

• Latin 1, Latin-1 character set (ISO-8859-1);
• Special, markup and internationalization characters;
• Symbols, greek characters and symbols.

Following are listed all the defined entities, split in the three above groups. For each entity, you will find its mnemonic, decimal and hex representation and how it is displayed by your browser.