Encode / Decode HTML Entities

Encode and Decode HTML Entities

Turn plain text into HTML-safe entities, or paste entity-laden markup and read it back as normal text. Encoding always escapes the five reserved characters (& < > " '), and can optionally convert every non-ASCII character too — as named references like ©, decimal (©), or hex (©).

Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is uploaded or logged — safe for snippets pulled from production HTML, email templates, or a database column full of escaped copy. Decoding understands the full standard named-entity table plus any decimal or hex reference, including emoji and other characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane. Switch direction with one click, or hit Swap to feed the output straight back in and confirm a string round-trips cleanly.

One honest note on named encoding: it uses the standard HTML 4 / XHTML entity names, and any character without a standard name (most emoji, for instance) falls back to a numeric reference automatically. If you need output that works on the widest range of older renderers, choose Decimal or Hex.

Common Use Cases

• Escape user copy: Make a headline or comment safe to drop into an HTML template so tags and ampersands render as text instead of breaking the page.
• Read scraped or logged HTML: Decode a blob like <div>Café</div> back into legible markup to see what a page or API actually returned.
• Email and newsletter HTML: Convert accents, curly quotes, em-dashes, and symbols to entities for clients and legacy templates that choke on raw UTF-8.
• ASCII-only output: Escape every non-ASCII character to numeric references for systems, feeds, or config files that must stay 7-bit clean.
• Debug double-encoding: Paste a string that shows < and decode it once or twice to spot where it was escaped one time too many.
• Copy either side: Encode a snippet for documentation, or decode an example so you can quote the real characters — copy the input or the result independently.

Privacy: This tool runs entirely in your browser using plain JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged — you can even run it offline once the page has loaded.