character reference
1
6.9
- noun
- /ˈkɛrɪktər ˈrɛfərəns/
- Specialized
:
referencia de carácter
- When creating XML documents, always ensure that each special character has a corresponding character reference to avoid errors.
Examples
-
The nondiagnostic character reference statements affected subjects' attitudes toward the defendant, but the nondiagnostic information had no effect on guilt judgments.
Academic text (1998) -
In HTML, you can use a character reference like é to display special characters correctly.
-
To insert a non-breaking space in HTML, use the character reference instead of just a space.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a straightforward compositional compound: 'character' (a symbol) combined with 'reference' (something that refers or points to) yields 'a reference to a character' — i.e. an encoding or named entity representing a character. Although the use is technical in computing/HTML, the meaning is directly derivable from the constituents and parallels exist in other languages, so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the sense.
Etymology
Character reference in computer text comes from the idea of a single character (a letter or symbol) and a reference (a code that points to that character), like a secret name that tells the computer which symbol to show. So today it means 'a code that represents a symbol in text'.