HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder
Encode special characters to HTML entities and decode them back safely
What is HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder?
HTML entities are a way to represent characters that have special meaning in HTML — or characters that cannot be typed directly — using a text escape sequence. The most important are the five characters that HTML parsers interpret as markup: the less-than sign (<) becomes <, the greater-than sign (>) becomes >, the ampersand (&) becomes &, the double quote (") becomes ", and the single quote (') becomes ' or '. Failing to encode these characters in user-generated content is the root cause of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities — one of the most common and dangerous web security flaws. Our free HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder helps developers encode strings before inserting them into HTML, and decode entity-encoded strings back to readable form when inspecting HTML source. Beyond the five critical security characters, the tool also handles the full range of named HTML entities for currency symbols, mathematical operators, arrows, Greek letters, and Unicode characters that may not display correctly in all environments.
How to Use HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder
- 1
Paste Your Input
Enter the text you want to encode — such as a user-submitted comment, a dynamic string that will appear in HTML, or a code snippet that contains < and > characters. Or paste already-encoded HTML to decode it.
- 2
Encode or Decode
Click "Encode to HTML Entities" to replace special characters with their entity equivalents. Click "Decode HTML Entities" to convert entity codes back to their readable characters.
- 3
Copy the Safe Output
Copy the encoded output and use it safely in HTML templates, database fields that store HTML content, email templates, or any context where raw special characters would be misinterpreted.
Use Cases
Sanitising User Input Before HTML Insertion
When a user submits a comment, review, or profile description that will be displayed in HTML, every special character must be entity-encoded before the string is inserted into your HTML template. Failing to do so lets malicious users inject <script> tags or event handlers into your page. Encode user content here as a quick check — or implement server-side HTML escaping in your framework for production.
Displaying Code Snippets in Web Pages
Blog posts and documentation often contain code examples with HTML tags, JavaScript operators, and comparison symbols (< and >) that conflict with HTML's own syntax. Before embedding a code snippet in an HTML page, encode it here so the < and > characters display as literal characters in the browser rather than being parsed as HTML tags.
Debugging Entity-Encoded Database Content
Some CMSs and form processors double-encode content — storing &amp; instead of & — resulting in literal entities showing up as text on the page. Decode the stored content here to see what the database actually contains, then trace where the double-encoding is occurring in the processing pipeline.
Features
Security-Critical Character Encoding
Encodes the five HTML-special characters (<, >, &, ", ') that are the source of XSS vulnerabilities when user content is inserted into HTML without escaping.
Named and Numeric Entity Support
Handles both named entities (&, <, ©, €) and numeric entities (<, &) — encoding to named form where available, numeric form otherwise.
Full Unicode and Special Symbol Coverage
Encodes currency symbols (€, £, ¥), mathematical operators (±, ×, ÷), arrows (→, ←), Greek letters (α, β, π), and other characters that can cause rendering issues in some contexts.
Bidirectional Conversion
Encode raw text to entities for safe HTML insertion, or decode entity-laden HTML back to readable text for inspection and editing.
Frequently Asked Questions
HTML entities are text sequences that represent characters that would otherwise be interpreted as HTML syntax or are difficult to type. The five mandatory ones are: < (<), > (>), & (&), " ("), and ' ('), which must be encoded when they appear in text content or attribute values. Other entities are optional — used for typographic precision or to represent Unicode characters in ASCII-only documents.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) occurs when user-supplied text containing HTML or JavaScript is inserted into a page without escaping. For example, if a user submits the name <script>alert("hacked")</script> and it is inserted directly into HTML, the browser executes the script. Encoding the < as < and > as > makes the browser display the literal characters instead of executing the script.
HTML encoding (entities) makes characters safe for insertion into HTML documents — replacing < with <. URL encoding (percent-encoding) makes characters safe for inclusion in URLs — replacing < with %3C. They are completely different mechanisms for completely different contexts. Never use HTML entities in URLs or URL encoding in HTML attributes.
If & is displaying literally as text on your page, the string has been HTML-entity-encoded but then entity-encoded again (double-encoded), producing &amp; which the browser correctly renders as &. Find where double-encoding is occurring — typically a CMS sanitiser running before an output escaper — and remove one layer. Use this decoder to confirm what the stored string actually contains.
is a non-breaking space — a space character that the browser will not collapse or break a line at. Use it to prevent two words from being separated across lines (e.g., 10 km, Fig. 3), to add spacing in table cells that must not be empty, or to preserve multiple sequential spaces (HTML collapses multiple whitespace characters to one). Overusing for layout spacing is an anti-pattern — use CSS padding and margin instead.
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