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This article lists the character entity references that are valid in HTML and XML documents. A character entity reference refers to the content of a named entity. An entity declaration is created in XML, SGML and HTML documents (before HTML5) by using the <!ENTITY name "value"> syntax in a Document type definition (DTD).
Codes from 160 to 255 can all be created using character entity names. Only a few higher-numbered codes can be created using entity names, but all can be created by decimal number character reference. Character entity references can also have the format &name; where name is a case-sensitive alphanumeric string.
Character entities can be included in an HTML document via the use of entity references, which take the form &EntityName;, where EntityName is the name of the entity. For example, — , much like — or — , represents U+ 2014 : the em dash character "—" even if the character encoding used doesn't contain that character.
The format is the same as for any entity reference: &name; where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. The semicolon is required. Because numbers are harder for humans to remember than names, character entity references are most often written by humans, while numeric character references are most often produced by computer programs. [1]
There is another kind of character reference called a character entity reference, which allows a character to be referred to by a name instead of a number. (Naming a character creates a character entity.) HTML defines some character entities, but not many; all other characters can only be included by direct encoding or using NCRs.
On the opposite, the code point U+0085 is a valid control character in Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, as well as in XML 1.0 and XML 1.1 documents (in all contexts), and its usage is not discouraged (it is treated as whitespace in many XML contexts, or as a line-break control similar to U+000D and U+000A in preformatted texts in some XML applications).
HTML 4.0 Character Entity References—shows how the named and decimal character references look in one's browser FileFormat.Info —details of many Unicode characters, including the named, decimal and hexadecimal character reference, showing how it should look and for each, how it looks in one's browser
Although any character can be referenced using a numeric character reference, a character entity reference allows characters to be referenced by name instead of code point. For example, HTML 4 has 252 built-in character entities that do not need to be explicitly declared, while XML has five.