Character Entity Reference

Your Website can be seen by a wide variety of people around the globe with variations of browsers and language environments. Sometimes commonly used special characters get displayed as if corrupted.
Example: on your US system screen, you see this:

Copyright ©

but someone on a Japanese system screen may see this:

The copyright sign is not displayed correctly on the latter screen. In many cases this type of display problem can be easily avoided by using the right kind of character representations. You can either use "character entity reference" or "numerical character reference".

Clicking the link (Character Entity Reference) at the bottom takes you to an external website where you see a page with characters and corresponding character entity reference representations, in the form &entity_name; (i.e. an ampersand, the entity name, and then a semi colon).

If you move your mouse over a character entity, 2 additional lines appear. The first additional line contains the numerical reference for the same character. The last line contains the unicode representation.
Note that the first one is decimal and second one is hexadecimal of the same number.

For a character "&":

&
&
u0026

For the case of the "©" sign:

©
©
u00A9

Character Entity Reference

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