HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder

HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder is a free online tool for converting special characters to HTML entities and decoding HTML entities back to readable text. This bidirectional converter supports both named entities (like &lt; and &gt;) and numeric entities (like &#60; and &#62;), helping developers safely display user-generated content in web pages, prevent XSS attacks, and work with HTML markup without breaking page structure. Perfect for web developers, content managers, security professionals, and anyone working with HTML, XML, or web content that needs proper character escaping. HTML entities are special codes used to represent characters that have special meaning in HTML or characters that aren't easily typed on a keyboard. For example, the less-than symbol < must be encoded as &lt; in HTML because browsers interpret it as the start of an HTML tag. Similarly, the ampersand & must be encoded as &amp; because it starts entity codes. Without proper encoding, these characters can break your HTML structure or create security vulnerabilities. Common use cases include encoding user input before displaying it in HTML to prevent XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks, fixing broken HTML where special characters weren't properly escaped, preparing content for insertion into HTML attributes or text nodes, working with international characters and symbols in web content, debugging HTML rendering issues caused by unescaped characters, converting content between different text formats (JSON to HTML, etc.), creating email templates that display correctly across email clients, and ensuring proper character display in RSS feeds and XML documents. The tool provides two encoding modes: Named Entity Encoding converts characters to their named equivalents (&lt;, &gt;, &quot;, &apos;, &amp;), which are more readable and widely supported, and Numeric Entity Encoding converts characters to their Unicode code points (&#60;, &#62;, &#34;, etc.), which works for any character but is less readable. The decoder automatically handles both named and numeric entities, converting them back to their original characters. Essential characters that should always be encoded in HTML include: less than (<) which starts HTML tags, greater than (>) which ends HTML tags, ampersand (&) which starts entity codes, double quotes (&quot;) in attribute values, and single quotes (&apos;) in attribute values. The tool includes a comprehensive reference table showing the most common HTML entities with their character, named entity, numeric entity, and description—perfect for quick lookup while coding. This reference covers essential symbols like copyright (©), registered trademark (®), trademark (™), currency symbols (€, £, ¥, ¢), and the non-breaking space. HTML entity encoding is crucial for web security because it prevents XSS attacks where malicious users inject JavaScript code into your pages through input fields. By encoding characters like < and >, you ensure that user input is displayed as text rather than executed as code. All encoding and decoding happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript's built-in HTML parsing capabilities, ensuring complete privacy—no text is sent to any server, and the tool works offline once loaded. The convenient swap button lets you quickly reverse input and output, useful when you need to encode, then decode, or vice versa. The tool handles edge cases including nested entities, malformed entities, and special Unicode characters. Understanding HTML entities is essential for frontend development, content management systems, email template design, and anywhere you display dynamic content in HTML. Named entities are generally preferred because they're easier to read in source code and remember (e.g., &copy; is clearer than &#169;), but numeric entities work for any Unicode character, not just the ones with named equivalents. Works on all modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. No registration or installation required.