What are HTML entities?
HTML entities are special character sequences that represent characters that would otherwise be interpreted by the HTML parser
(like <, >, &) or characters that are inconvenient to type (like © or non-Latin
letters). They come in three flavours: named (&), decimal numeric (&), and hexadecimal numeric (&).
What this tool does
- Encode — escape
<,>,&,", and'always, with optional encoding of every non-ASCII character. - Decode — turn entities back into raw characters, handling named, decimal, and hex forms.
- Auto — detect which direction makes sense based on the input.
- Named vs numeric — choose between named entities (more readable) and numeric (always portable).
Tips
- If your text will be inserted as an HTML attribute, also encode the surrounding quote character.
- For emoji and other characters above the BMP, numeric entities use the code point (e.g.
😀for 😀). - Decoder uses a safe parser — no scripts are executed even if the input contains malicious markup.
Encoding and decoding both happen locally in your browser — your text never leaves your machine.