HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

Why HTML entities exist

A handful of characters carry special meaning in HTML. The browser reads < as the start of a tag and & as the start of an entity, so to show those characters literally you must replace them with entities — < and &. Entities also let you embed symbols and accented letters that might be awkward to type or that could be mangled by a system using the wrong text encoding. This tool converts in both directions: paste plain text to get safe, entity-encoded HTML, or paste encoded HTML to recover the original readable text.

Named vs numeric, minimal vs all

Named entities like © are readable but limited to a defined list; numeric entities like © work for every character because they reference its Unicode code point directly. The scope toggle controls how much gets escaped: minimal touches only the structural characters (& < > " ') needed to keep markup valid, while encode-all additionally escapes non-ASCII characters — handy when targeting older systems or channels that don't guarantee UTF-8.

Entities and security

Encoding isn't only cosmetic — it's a frontline defence against cross-site scripting (XSS). If user-supplied text is dropped into a page without escaping, a stray <script> can execute in your visitors' browsers. Escaping & and < in content, and the quote character in attribute values, neutralises that risk by rendering the text as data rather than markup. Use minimal encoding for live HTML output, and decode safely here to inspect exactly what an encoded snippet actually contains.