HTML Topics: Special Characters

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Special Characters

You will have noticed that HTML commands are identified by the < and > characters. Therefore confusion is likely to arise if you try to write something like the following:

a < b, b > c

If you typed the characters exactly as shown above, it would actually give the following line:

a c

This is because "b, b" is treated as a (meaningless) HTML command because it is enclosed by "<" and ">" !

"<" and ">"

These are the two most important characters to be aware of. If you want to have these printed in a document, you invoke them by typing:

&lt;  for the "less than" sign i.e. "<".

&gt;  for the "greater than" sign i.e. ">".

Do not forget the final semi-colon! Some browsers can cope with this mistake, while others cannot.

Therefore to create this: a < b, b > c  you should type:

a &lt; b, b &gt; c

Non-breaking Spaces

Normally the browser is given the freedom to format the page as best it can using spaces in the text as a delimiter for deciding when to wrap the text to the next line. Occasionally, this can give bad results and, as in word processing, non-breaking spaces may be required. This is acheived using the special word "&nbsp;" instead of a " " (space) character. &nbsp; can also be used repetitively to force multiple spaces in the text as shown below:

This is a big      space.

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