RSS Advisory Board

Special Symbols and Entities

Archivist's Note: This is character encoding documentation that was referenced by the RSS 0.90 specification published by Netscape on March 15, 1999. The current version of the RSS 2.0 specification is available at this link and other revisions have been archived.

To use the upper ASCII characters in HTML documents, you need to type decimal references or entity references.

Decimal references have the format &#nnn; where nnn is a number that references the character. Entity references have the format &nnn; where nnn is a text string that references the character.

In addition to entity and decimal references, HTML has reserved characters that have special meanings in HTML files. For example, HTML uses angle brackets to enclose HTML tags. If you want to use an angle bracket in your text, you have to use a special character or entity reference; otherwise, Netscape Navigator (or other web browser) might misinterpret the character and display incorrect text or even an error message.

• Special Characters
• Character and Decimal Entities

Special Characters

Table A. Special Characters

Character and Decimal Entities

The following table lists characters and their entity and decimal references. You must use either the entity or decimal reference if you want to use one of these characters in your HTML files.

Table B. Characters and their Decimal References