HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

About the HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

HTML entities such as &lt; and &amp; let you show characters that HTML would otherwise treat as markup. Encode escapes the five significant characters (& < > " and ') so text can be placed safely in HTML; Decode turns named and numeric entities back into characters.

Other characters, including accented letters and emoji, are left as they are rather than converted to entities, since UTF-8 pages can contain them directly.

How to use it

1. Choose Encode Text or Decode Entities.
2. Paste your text, or press Sample Data.
3. Press Copy Output to take the result.

Worked example

Encode Text mode.

<a href="x">Tom & Jerry</a>

<a href="x">Tom & Jerry</a>

Common mistakes and gotchas

• Encoding is not a complete defence against cross-site scripting. Context matters: text inside a script block, a URL attribute or CSS needs different escaping.
• Decoding runs once. &amp;lt; becomes &lt;, not <, because the entity was double-encoded.
• An unrecognised name such as &bogus; is left unchanged instead of being guessed at.
• Decode handles decimal (&#65;) and hexadecimal (&#x41;) numeric references as well as named ones like &copy;.

Frequently asked questions