Accents and Special Characters

Some languages use accentuated letters, such as the French é or à, and that can be a problem. The solution is to use certain character references instead. In this section we explain the character entity references, which are easier to remember than the numerical character references.

Since accentuated letters such as: é, è, ï, or ê do not exist in all software character sets used all around the world, they would not display correctly in every browser if included in an HTML page.

This problem can be likened to that of employing characters used by the HTML syntax itself, such as <, > and ". When a browser comes across such characters, it tries to interpret the content instead of displaying it. So a number of these references have been created to allow such characters to be included without causing any problems. They always appear in the form: &symbolic_name;. Here are the most commonly used:

To obtain:	Type in:
é	é
è	è
à	à
>	>
<	&lt;
"	&quot;
non breaking space	&nbsp;
ç	&ccedil;