emacs: how to insert an HTML entity reference?

Question

Just now I was fumbling around on the keyboard and saw a  appear in the emacs buffer.

How'd I do that?

That would be handy, if I could do it on purpose.

Answer 1

Every editing mode has a help page, which you can see through C-h m (when you're in that mode) or C-h f <mode-name> when in another mode. The mode's help-page shows you the current key-bindings. Looking through the help-page for html-mode, I see C-c C-n is bound to sgml-name-char, which looks likely to perform the function you describe.