HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder

How to encode or decode HTML entities

1. Paste your text or HTML in the input box.
2. To escape it, choose the characters to encode: Only & < > " ' or Also every non-ASCII character, and pick an Entity format: Named (&eacute;), Decimal (&#233;) or Hexadecimal (&#xE9;).
3. Click Encode, or click Decode to turn entities back into characters.
4. Read the count in the status line, then click Copy. Use output as input moves the result to the input box, for example to check a round trip.

Encoding: when and what to escape

In HTML, five characters can be mistaken for markup. Only & < > " ' replaces exactly these: & with &, < with <, > with >, " with " and ' with '. This is what you need to show code on a web page, to put user text inside an attribute, or to paste a snippet into a blog post or a CMS field that expects HTML. The apostrophe uses the numeric form because ' did not exist in HTML 4 and some older parsers do not know it.

Also every non-ASCII character additionally replaces everything outside printable ASCII: accented letters, typographic quotes, the euro sign, non-breaking spaces, emoji and so on. The result is pure ASCII, which is useful for systems that mangle UTF-8, for e-mail templates, or to make invisible characters such as   visible in the source.

The Entity format decides how characters are written:

• Named (&eacute;) uses a readable name when HTML defines one (é, €, …), preferring the classic HTML 4 name when a character has several. Characters without a name, such as emoji, fall back to decimal.
• Decimal (&#233;) writes the Unicode code point in base 10.
• Hexadecimal (&#xE9;) writes it in base 16, which matches the U+00E9 notation of Unicode charts.

All three are understood by every browser. Characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, such as 😀, are encoded as one reference to the full code point (😀), not as two surrogate halves.

Decoding: the HTML5 rules

Decode follows the rules that browsers use when they read text content, with the complete list of 2,231 named character references from the HTML Living Standard:

• named references such as é, → or ≂̸ (some produce two code points);
• decimal (é) and hexadecimal (é or é) references, with or without the final semicolon;
• legacy names that browsers accept without a semicolon, like &copy 2026 or &amp — and, as in browsers, &notit; becomes ¬it; because &not is such a legacy name;
• numeric references in the 128–159 range are mapped to the Windows-1252 characters browsers show (– gives an en dash), and �, surrogates and values above U+10FFFF become the replacement character �.

Unknown names such as &foo; are left unchanged and counted in the status line. Decoding is done by the tool’s own parser, not by inserting your text into the page, so any markup or script in the input is never interpreted.