About HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder
HTML entities are used to display reserved characters (like <, >, &) in HTML without the browser interpreting them as code. Our free online tool allows you to quickly encode text into HTML entities or decode entities back into plain text.
How It Works
The tool scans your input text and replaces special characters with their corresponding HTML entity codes (e.g., '<' becomes '<'). When decoding, it does the reverse, parsing the entity codes and converting them back to their original characters.
Common Use Cases
- Displaying code snippets safely on a webpage
- Preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks by sanitizing user input
- Decoding scraped web data that contains HTML entities
- Ensuring special characters render correctly across all browsers
Frequently Asked Questions
If you want to display HTML tags like <div> on a webpage, the browser will try to render it as an actual element. Encoding it to <div> tells the browser to display the text literally.
Yes, it supports all standard HTML5 entities, including special symbols, currency signs, and mathematical operators.
The most common are & (&), < (<), > (>), " ("), and ' ('). These must be encoded to prevent them from being interpreted as HTML markup.
Encoding prevents XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks by ensuring user-generated content is treated as text, not executable HTML or JavaScript code.
Named entities use human-readable names like &copy; (©). Numeric entities use Unicode code points like &#169; or &#xA9;. Both produce the same result.
Yes, any Unicode character can be represented as an HTML entity using its numeric code point. For example, the heart emoji ❤ is &#10084; in HTML.