Special Characters

Three characters out of the entire ASCII character set are special and cannot be used "as-is" within an HTML document. These characters are left angle bracket (<), right angle bracket (>), and ampersand (&).

The angle brackets are used to specify HTML tags, while the & (ampersand) is used as an "escape" mechanism that alerts the browser that the next few characters until it sees a semicolon, represent a special character that it must look up and display.

To get a browser to display these characters, you must use the escape sequence in your HTML text. If you wanted to write this:

you would have to write it as this:

<UL>

</UL>

There are many additional escape sequences. "Escape sequence" means that the given sequence of characters represents a single character in an HTML display. The semicolon is required. The conversion to the single character itself takes place when the document is formatted for display by a reader.

[Forward] Go to a list of all the HTML Escape Sequences

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