HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder
Escape HTML special characters so markup renders as text, or decode entities back. Handles named and numeric entities.
How to use it
- Paste HTML to escape it for display inside a page.
- Paste entities to see the readable characters.
- Optional aggressive mode escapes every non-ASCII character as numeric entities.
HTML treats certain characters as markup syntax — <, >, &, " and ' — so text containing them has to be escaped into entities before it's safe to display as literal text inside an HTML page, or those characters get interpreted as tags and attributes instead of shown on screen.
Encoding — making markup display as text
Paste HTML source (or any text that happens to contain < or & characters) and this escapes the special characters into named entities: < becomes <, > becomes >, & becomes &, " becomes ". This is what lets a code snippet or example markup actually render as visible text on a page instead of the browser trying to run it as real HTML.
Decoding — going back to readable characters
Paste text containing entities like &copy; or numeric entities like © and it decodes back to the readable characters (© in that example) — useful when working with HTML source, RSS feeds, or scraped content where entities show up instead of the character they represent.
Aggressive mode
Named and numeric entities cover the core HTML-reserved characters by default. Aggressive mode goes further and escapes every non-ASCII character as a numeric entity, useful for maximum compatibility with older systems, legacy email clients, or contexts that mishandle raw UTF-8 — at the cost of much longer output for text with accents, symbols or non-Latin scripts.
Last updated 17 August 2026