Character entities have two functions:

escaping special characters displaying other characters not available in the plain ASCII character set.

Four characters, the left angle bracket "<", the right angle bracket ">" the ampersand "&" and a pixel space have special meaning in HTML and cannot be used "as is".

The angle brackets are used to indicate the beginning and end of HTML tags, and the ampersand is used to indicate the beginning of an escape sequence.

To use one of the three characters in an HTML document, you must enter its escape sequence instead:

&lt; = <
&gt; = >
&amp; = &
&nbsp; = a space
Unlike the rest of HTML, the escape sequences are case sensitive. You cannot, for example use &LT; instead of &lt.

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