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HTML

Wenqian Guo
Wenqian Guo
2,612 Points
Posted by Wenqian Guo
Wenqian Guo
2,612 Points

&

we use & to display & in html in case the browser can't recognize &? Is that correct? Or is that just a html way of displaying &??Do we have to do that for all symbols???

1 Answer

John W
John W
21,558 Points
John W
John W
21,558 Points

Yes, because the ampersand (&) by itself starts an escaping sequence that the browser will convert to whatever symbol it means. Another example would be the less-than symbol (<). By itself it means the beginning of a tag, so if you just have it in your HTML the browser would assume a tag follows, and nothing would get displayed. To display the actual symbol, you would do &lt;.

Thus, any symbol that is either reserved (<, >, &, ', ") or "weird" (e.g. ÷, Ç) should be displayed by escaping with &. And since & itself is reserved for escaping, you would display it with &amp; instead of just having it in your HTML text file.