Character reference

An HTML character reference is an escape sequence of characters that is used to represent another character in the rendered web page.

Character references are used as replacements for characters that are reserved in HTML, such as the less-than (<) and greater-than (>) symbols used by the HTML parser to identify element tags, or ” or ‘ within attributes, which may be enclosed by those characters. They can also be used for invisible characters that would otherwise be impossible to type, including non-breaking spaces, control characters like left-to-right and right-to-left marks, and for characters that are hard to type on a standard keyboard.