Why do computers sometimes change special characters like “&” into “&” or “ ”

Question

Why do computers sometimes change special characters like “&” into “&” or “ ”

In: 77

Answer 1

Various computer languages use characters like &, <, >, *, etc for special purposes. One of those languages is HTML which is used to make webpages. But what happens if you want to show one of those characters on the web page? The language is also designed with sequences called escape characters, which are an alternate way to tell the web page to display the & (or other) character normally instead of using it as code.

However if you display that document in something that isn’t designed to use those special codes it will show you the original text including the escape sequences like &amp;