# entities (text)

Source: https://ref.dm-lang.org/DM/text/entities

Special characters may be inserted into text using HTML syntax. Such characters are known as entities. They start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. The main reason for doing this is to insert characters that otherwise have a special meaning. The most common entities have names. The rest must be referred to by their Unicode character number (e.g. `&#38;` is the same as `&`). The common ones are listed in the following table. Note that the same effect may be achieved by simply escaping the special character (like `<`). The full entity syntax is included for generality.

|Entity|Character|
|------|---------|
|& |    &    |
| < |   \<    |
| > |   \>    |
|&quot;|    "    |
|&copy;|    ©    |

When using numbered entities, you can put an `x` in front of the number to use hexadecimal. For instance `&#x26;`, `&#38;`, and `&` are all equivalent.

### See also
- [macros (text)](https://ref.dm-lang.org/DM/text/macros/index.md)
- [tags (text)](https://ref.dm-lang.org/DM/text/tags.md)
- [text](https://ref.dm-lang.org/DM/text/index.md)