HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder

HTML entities are a way to represent characters that either have special meaning in HTML markup — like < and & and " — or fall outside the basic ASCII range, so they display correctly instead of being misread as part of the markup itself. For example, a literal "<" in text content could be misread by a browser as the start of a tag, so it's written as &lt; instead. This matters most whenever text isn't guaranteed to be "safe" HTML already — user-submitted comments, product names with an ampersand, or any text inserted into a page that could otherwise accidentally form real markup.

A named entity uses a mnemonic name, like &amp; or &copy; — easier to read, but only a defined set of names exist. A numeric character reference uses the character's actual Unicode code point instead, either decimal (&#169;) or hexadecimal (&#x00A9;) — every character has one, since it's just a number, but it's less readable at a glance. Both decode to the exact same character (© in this example); this tool's "output format" option lets you choose named-where-available or always-numeric for the entities it produces, and decodes either form (or a mix of both) without needing to know which was used.

Two common cases: safely displaying text that came from somewhere untrusted (a user comment, a form submission) inside HTML, so a literal "<" or "&" in what someone typed can't accidentally form real markup; and embedding a character your keyboard or codebase encoding can't easily produce directly — a currency symbol, an accented letter, a special dash, or a symbol like © or ™ — as a reliable ASCII-safe reference instead.

No. All encoding and decoding happens locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded, logged, or transmitted.