HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

An HTML entity encoder/decoder that escapes special characters (like <, >, &) for safe rendering in HTML, and decodes entity-riddled text back into readable characters.

This tool encodes text for safe embedding in HTML, and decodes entity-riddled text back to readable characters. HTML gives special meaning to a handful of characters: < opens a tag, & starts an entity, quotes delimit attributes. Put raw user text or code containing those characters into a page and the browser misreads it — content disappears into imaginary tags, layouts break, and in the worst case injected script runs. The fix is entity encoding: < becomes &lt;, & becomes &amp;, and the browser displays the characters instead of interpreting them.

Encoding here covers the five structurally dangerous characters (&, <, >, double and single quotes) plus any character outside printable ASCII, which is emitted as a numeric entity — handy when your file might travel through systems that mangle UTF-8. Decoding understands the common named entities (&amp;, &lt;, &gt;, &quot;, &apos;, &nbsp;) as well as decimal (&#8377;) and hex (&#x20B9;) numeric forms, so text copied out of HTML source, RSS feeds or scraped pages turns back into normal prose.

Everyday jobs: embedding a code snippet in a blog post so if (a < b) displays literally; putting a company name like "R&D Labs" into an HTML attribute; cleaning up an exported document where every rupee sign arrived as &#8377;. One caution — entity encoding output is for HTML contexts. It is not sufficient escaping for JavaScript strings, URLs or SQL; each context has its own rules (the URL encoder next door handles that case).