HTML Entities Explained for Beginners

HTML uses characters like < and > to define tags. If you want to show those characters as text on a page, they often need to be encoded as entities.

For example, encoding helps display a code snippet without the browser interpreting it as real markup.

You do not need to memorize every entity, but a few appear often when copying text from pages, templates, or code examples.

• &lt; represents <.
• &gt; represents >.
• &amp; represents &.
• &quot; represents a double quote.

Encoding text is useful, but it is not the same as a complete security sanitizer. If you are accepting user-generated HTML in a real app, use a trusted sanitization approach for that environment.