HTML Entities: The Complete Guide to Special Characters and XSS Prevention
HTML entities are the backbone of safe web content rendering. Getting them wrong leads to broken layouts, encoding issues, and XSS vulnerabilities. The 5 Characters You Must Always Encode <!-- These 5 MUST be encoded in HTML content --> & → & <!-- Would be parsed as entity start --> < → & lt ; <! -- Would start a tag -- > > → > <!-- Would end a tag --> " → " <!-- In quoted attributes --> ' → ' <!-- In single-quoted attributes --> Named vs Numeric Entities Three equivalent ways to write the same character: <!-- Named entity (most readable) --> © → © <!-- Decimal numeric entity --> © → © <!-- Hex numeric entity --> © → © Essential Entities Reference Typography: | Character | Entity | Code | |-----------|--------|------| | © | © | Copyright | | ® | ® | Registered | | ™ | ™ | Trademark | | — | — | Em dash | | – | – | En dash | | … | … | Ellipsis | | " | “ | Left double quote | | " | ” | Right double quote | | | &n
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