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[Glossary](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary) 2. [Character reference](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference) # Character reference An [HTML](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/HTML) **character reference** is an [escape sequence](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Escape_character) of [characters](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character) that is used to represent another character in the rendered web page. Character references are used as replacements for characters that are reserved in HTML, such as the less-than (`<`) and greater-than (`>`) symbols used by the HTML parser to identify element [tags](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Tag), or `"` or `'` within attributes, which may be enclosed by those characters. They can also be used for invisible characters that would otherwise be impossible to type, including non-breaking spaces, control characters like left-to-right and right-to-left marks, and for characters that are hard to type on a standard keyboard. There are three types of character references: [**Named character references**](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference#named_character_references) These use a name string between an ampersand (`&`) and a semicolon (`;`) to refer to the corresponding character. For example, `<` is used for the less-than (`<`) symbol, and `©` for the copyright symbol (`©`). The string used for the reference is often a [camel-cased](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Camel_case) initialization or contraction of the character name. [**Decimal numeric character references**](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference#decimal_numeric_character_references) These references start with `&#`, followed by one or more ASCII digits representing the base-ten integer that corresponds to the character's [Unicode](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Unicode) [code point](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Code_point), and ending with `;`. For example, the decimal character reference for `<` is `<`, because the Unicode code point for the symbol is `U+0003C`, and `3C` hexadecimal is 60 in decimal. [**Hexadecimal numeric character references**](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference#hexadecimal_numeric_character_references) These references start with `&#x` or `&#X`, followed by one or more ASCII hex digits, representing the hexadecimal integer that corresponds to the character's Unicode code point, and ending with `;`. For example, the hexadecimal character reference for `<` is `<` or `<`, because the Unicode code point for the symbol is `U+0003C`. A very small subset of useful named character references along with their unicode code points are listed below. | Character | Named reference | Unicode code-point | | --- | --- | --- | | & | `&` | U+00026 | | < | `<` | U+0003C | | > | `>` | U+0003E | | " | `"` | U+00022 | | ' | `'` | U+00027 | | | ` ` | U+000A0 | | – | `–` | U+02013 | | — | `—` | U+02014 | | © | `©` | U+000A9 | | ® | `®` | U+000AE | | ™ | `™` | U+02122 | | ≈ | `≈` | U+02248 | | ≠ | `≠` | U+02260 | | £ | `£` | U+000A3 | | € | `€` | U+020AC | | ° | `°` | U+000B0 | The full list of HTML named character references [can found in the HTML specification here](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/named-characters.html#named-character-references). ## In this article * [See also](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference#see_also) ## [See also](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character_reference#see_also) * Related glossary terms: * [Character](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Character) * [Escape character](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Escape_character) * [Code point](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Code_point) * [Unicode](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Unicode)