Named character entities Unicode and HTML

in html, there standard set of 252 named character entities characters - common, obscure - either not found in character encodings or markup sensitive in contexts (for example angle brackets , quotation marks). although unicode character can referenced numeric code point, html document authors prefer use these named entities instead, possible, less cryptic , better supported browsers.

character entities can included in html document via use of entity references, take form &entityname;, entityname name of entity. example, —, — or —, represents u+2014: em dash character — if character encoding used doesn t contain character.

for full list, see: list of xml , html character entity references.