The HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder converts special characters to their HTML entity equivalents and vice versa. Whether you need to safely display user input in HTML, decode scraped web content, or prepare text for email templates, this tool handles named entities (&), decimal entities (&), and hexadecimal entities (&) with ease.
Step-by-Step
Paste your text — Enter raw text to encode or HTML-encoded text to decode into the input panel.
Choose the operation — Select Encode to convert special characters to entities, or Decode to convert entities back to readable text.
Select entity format — Choose between named entities (&), decimal numeric (&), or hexadecimal numeric (&) for encoding output.
View the result — The converted text appears instantly in the output panel with syntax highlighting.
Copy the output — Use the clipboard button to copy the encoded or decoded text.
Numeric Entity Support — Handles both decimal (<) and hexadecimal (<) entity formats for complete Unicode coverage.
Bidirectional Conversion — Encode special characters into entities or decode entities back to their original characters with a single click.
Selective Encoding — Choose to encode only essential characters (<, >, &, ", ') or encode all non-ASCII characters for maximum compatibility.
Bulk Processing — Handles large blocks of text instantly, making it suitable for processing entire HTML documents or template files.
Real-Time Preview — See the conversion result update live as you type or modify the input.
Common Use Cases
XSS Prevention — Encode user-submitted content before rendering it in HTML to prevent cross-site scripting attacks.
Email Templates — Encode special characters in HTML email templates to ensure they render correctly across all email clients.
Web Scraping — Decode HTML entities in scraped web content to get clean, readable text for processing or storage.
CMS Content — Encode content for safe storage in databases and decode it for display in content management systems.
Internationalization — Encode non-ASCII characters as numeric entities for HTML documents that need to work with any character encoding.
Why Use This Tool
HTML entities are essential for web security and compatibility, but remembering entity names and codes is impractical. This tool provides instant bidirectional conversion with support for all standard entity formats. It's especially valuable for preventing XSS vulnerabilities, fixing encoding issues in email templates, and cleaning up scraped web content. All processing happens in your browser — no data is sent to any server.