HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

What this tool does

Paste text on the left and its encoded or decoded form appears on the right the instant you type — there is no button to hunt for. Encode turns characters into HTML entities so they can sit safely inside a web page; Decode reverses that, turning entities back into the characters they stand for. Every character reference this tool recognises comes from the published WHATWG Named character references table, the same list browsers use, so nothing is guessed.

The three encode modes, and when to use each

Markup characters only (named) is the default and the one you want most of the time. It escapes just the five characters that mean something to the HTML parser — & < > " ' — and leaves every other character, including accented letters and emoji, exactly as-is. This is the correct, minimal transform for dropping arbitrary text into HTML body content or an attribute value. For example:

All non-ASCII — numeric also escapes every character above code point 127 as a numeric reference, in &#NNN; decimal or &#xHH; hex. Reach for this when the file, database column or email system that will carry your HTML is not reliably UTF-8 and you need pure ASCII on the wire. All non-ASCII — named where one exists does the same but prefers a readable name — ©, —, £ — falling back to a numeric reference for the many characters that have no name.

Named vs numeric, side by side

All of these are three spellings of the very same character; a browser renders them identically:

Note the last row: emoji and most symbols have no named reference, so a named-mode encoder falls back to a numeric one for them. That is expected, not a bug — only about 2,125 characters have WHATWG names.

Decoding, and how invalid input is handled

Decode resolves all three forms at once — named (—), decimal (—) and hex (—) — and it is deliberately conservative:

• Unknown named references are left untouched. © becomes ©, but &nope; stays &nope; — the tool never invents a character for a name it does not recognise.
• A bare ampersand is preserved. Tom & Jerry and AT&T come through unchanged, because neither & begins a complete &…; reference.
• Out-of-range numeric references are preserved. A code point above U+10FFFF, such as �, is left as written rather than mangled.
• Astral characters survive. 😀 decodes to 😀, and even a split pair like �� reassembles correctly.

Honest limits

On decode, this tool requires the trailing semicolon: © resolves but the legacy no-semicolon form &copy is left as text. Real browsers accept a short list of those semicolon-less references in specific positions, but the rules are context-sensitive and easy to get subtly wrong, so this tool sticks to the unambiguous, always-valid form. It also escapes by rule, not by context — it will not, for instance, know that text destined for a <script> block or a URL needs a different escaping scheme. For URLs use the URL encoder; for JSON string escaping use the JSON formatter.

Common uses

Pasting a snippet of code or markup into a blog post or documentation (escape it so the tags show as text rather than render); preparing user-supplied text for safe insertion into a template; forcing tricky typography — em dashes, curly quotes, non-breaking spaces — into ASCII-only entities for a fussy CMS or email; and cleaning up a fragment someone sent you full of & and ' by decoding it back to readable text.