Escape Character Names

There are two ways of including an escape character in your HTML text. The first, mentioned on the next page, simply utilizes the decimal-based character code. This of course can be difficult to remember for the characters you may need.

Escape names often have special codes that are more “human readable,” known as entity names. The less-than and greater-than characters (< and >) are escaped quite often in web design, and have entity names “lt” and “gt,” respectively.

Not many characters have entity names. To use an entity name, begin with an ampersand (&), add the entity name, and finish with a semicolon (;). In fact, to use the ampersand (&) we would write the escape character name as &.