Editing Numeric character reference (section)

{{Short description|Common markup construct used in SGML, XML, and HTML}}
{{one source|date=February 2021}}
A '''numeric character reference''' ('''NCR''') is a common [[markup (computer programming)|markup]] construct used in [[SGML]] and SGML-derived markup languages such as [[HTML]] and [[XML]]. It consists of a short sequence of [[character (computing)|character]]s that, in turn,  represents a single character. Since [[SGML|WebSgml]], [[XML]] and [[HTML 4]], the code points of the [[Universal Character Set]] (UCS) of [[Unicode]] are used. NCRs are typically used in order to represent characters that are not [[plain text#Encoding|directly encodable]] in a particular document (for example, because they are international characters that do not fit in the 8-bit [[Character encoding|character set]] being used, or because they have special syntactic meaning in the language). When the document is interpreted by a markup-aware reader, each NCR is treated as if it were the character it represents.