HTML Entity Encoder

The HTML Entity Encoder escapes and unescapes HTML entities in plain text, covering exactly the five characters that browsers treat as markup — & < > " ' — in either named or numeric form. On the Encode tab a radio group chooses the style: named entities like &amp; and &lt; that stay readable in source, or numeric entities like &#38; and &#60; that work in contexts where named forms are unsupported. Only those five characters are transformed; everything else, including text that already contains entities, passes through untouched. The Decode tab understands hex (&#xe9;), decimal (&#8364;), and a large table of named entities from &nbsp; and &copy; through Greek letters and math symbols, converting them back to real characters. Both tabs have their own Load sample link — one with HTML tags and quotes to escape, one mixing named, hex, and decimal entities to decode. Outputs download as encoded-html.txt or decoded-html.txt. Use it to safely embed code snippets in blog posts, clean up scraped content, or fix text that renders as raw &amp; strings.

1. 1

   Open the Encode tab and paste the text you want to escape.

2. 2

   Pick Named or Numeric with the encoding style radio buttons.

3. 3

   Copy the encoded result from the Encoded output box, or download it as encoded-html.txt.

4. 4

   Switch to the Decode tab to turn entities back into characters.

5. 5

   Use the Load sample links under each tab for realistic starting examples.

• Escaping code snippets before embedding them in blog posts or CMS content.
• Decoding scraped HTML entities into normal text for storage or analysis.
• Preparing text for XML-adjacent contexts where raw angle brackets are invalid.
• Converting legacy numeric entities in a database into readable characters.
• Sanitizing display text so user input containing < or & never breaks markup.
• Checking how a page renders named versus numeric entities in source code.

• Remember the tool escapes only the five markup characters — it is not a full HTML sanitizer and does not strip scripts or attributes.
• Choose named entities when humans will read the output, numeric when the consumer is XML tooling.
• Do not double-encode: text already containing &amp; becomes &amp;amp; if you encode it again.
• Decode before storing into a database when you want normalized text, not markup-ready text.
• For escaping text inserted into HTML attributes, both styles work, but always quote attribute values too.
• Review the full decode table output when automated cleaning, since unsupported named entities are left as-is.

• Use the Encode tab's sample to see both styles produce equivalent safety for the same input.
• Decode copied page source before pasting into documentation — it is much more readable without entities.
• When debugging a double-encoded string, decode twice and compare each intermediate result.
• Download encoded-html.txt when the escaped output is long, so line breaks are preserved exactly.