You can add a Unicode character to an HTML document by creating an HTML entity from:
- A named character reference — available for most common characters;
- A numeric code reference (either in decimal or hexadecimal) — available for all characters.
For example, the copyright symbol (©) is represented in the following way:
copy
— named reference;169
— decimal numeric reference;U+000A9
— hexadecimal numeric reference.
You can create an HTML entity from any of these in the following ways:
©
— by adding the named reference between&
and;
©
— by adding the decimal reference betweenand
;
©
— by adding the hexadecimal reference betweenand
;
Things to remember:
- All HTML entities begin with an ampersand (
&
) and end with a semi-colon (;
); - For numeric references (i.e. both, decimal and hexadecimal) you must add a hash (
#
) after the ampersand (&
); - For hexadecimal references you must also prefix the hexadecimal number with
x
to indicate that the numbers that follow should be interpreted as hexadecimal; - For hexadecimal references, you may have noticed that
U+000
was omitted from the entity. This is becauseU+
is merely used as a convention to denote that the hexadecimal digits that follow are Unicode code points, and this is never added to the HTML entity. The leading zeros, however, are optional to add.
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