<code>: The Inline Code element

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The <code> HTML element displays its contents styled in a fashion intended to indicate that the text is a short fragment of computer code. By default, the content text is displayed using the user agent's default monospace font.

Try it

<p>
  The <code>push()</code> method adds one or more elements to the end of an
  array and returns the new length of the array.
</p>

code {
  background-color: #eee;
  border-radius: 3px;
  font-family: courier, monospace;
  padding: 0 3px;
}

Attributes

This element only includes the global attributes.

Examples

A paragraph of text that includes <code>:

html

<p>
  The function <code>selectAll()</code> highlights all the text in the input
  field so the user can, for example, copy or delete the text.
</p>

Result

Notes

To represent multiple lines of code, wrap the <code> element within a <pre> element. The <code> element by itself only represents a single phrase of code or line of code.

A CSS rule can be defined for the code selector to override the browser's default font face. Preferences set by the user might take precedence over the specified CSS.

Technical summary

Content categories	Flow content, phrasing content, palpable content.
Permitted content	Phrasing content.
Tag omission	None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts phrasing content.
Implicit ARIA role	`code`
Permitted ARIA roles	Any
DOM interface	`HTMLElement` Up to Gecko 1.9.2 (Firefox 4) inclusive, Firefox implements the `HTMLSpanElement` interface for this element.

Specifications

Specification
HTML # the-code-element