HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder

Characters like < and & have special meaning in HTML, so dropping them into a page unescaped can break markup or open the door to injection issues. HTML entities are the safe, spelled-out stand-ins, and this tool converts between raw text and entities in either direction.

Why entities exist at all

A browser reading your HTML treats < as the start of a tag. If your actual content contains a literal less-than sign, the parser needs to be told "this is just a character, not markup", and < is how you say that. The same logic applies to &, >, quotes and any character outside the standard set your page's encoding expects.

This matters most when you're generating HTML from user-submitted text, building an XML feed, or hand-editing a CMS field that doesn't escape things for you automatically.

What this tool actually does

Encode mode walks through your text and replaces the handful of characters that are unsafe in HTML, plus any character outside the basic ASCII range, with its entity form. Decode mode does the reverse using the browser's own HTML parser, so it correctly handles both named entities like & and numeric ones like é.

Decoding runs through an inert, sandboxed parser that never executes anything, so it's safe to paste in entity-encoded text from an untrusted source and just read the plain result.

Where this comes up

Cleaning up text copied out of a CMS that shows raw entity codes instead of rendering them, preparing a snippet of code to display literally inside a <pre> block without it being interpreted as markup, or debugging a feed that shows &amp; where a single & should be.

If you're stripping tags entirely rather than escaping them, our Remove HTML Tags tool is the faster option for that specific job.