HTML Entities Encoder & Decoder Online — Free Tool

What are HTML Entities?

HTML entities are text sequences used to represent characters that have special meaning in HTML or that cannot easily be typed. A character like < (less-than sign) triggers tag parsing in a browser, so to display it as literal text you write the entity &lt; instead. Entities begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;), either in named form (e.g. &amp;, &quot;) or numeric form (e.g. &#60;). The HTML specification defines hundreds of named entities covering accented letters, symbols, mathematical operators, and more.

When do you need to encode or decode HTML entities?

Encoding and decoding HTML entities is a routine task in web development and content management. Common use cases include:

• Displaying code samples — show raw HTML markup on a page without the browser interpreting the tags.
• Fixing garbled content — CMS systems, email clients, and APIs sometimes double-encode or improperly escape content; a decoder lets you inspect the actual string.
• Template and email development — HTML emails require strictly escaped content to render correctly across clients.
• Data sanitisation — encoding user-submitted text before inserting it into HTML prevents cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.
• Copying text from PDFs or Word documents — smart quotes and special characters often need to be replaced with their correct HTML entity equivalents.

Encode vs. Decode — which direction do I need?

Encoding converts a string containing raw HTML characters (<, >, &, ") into their safe entity equivalents so the text renders as-is in a browser. Decoding reverses the process — turning entity sequences back into their original characters, useful when you need to read or edit a string that has already been escaped. This tool supports both directions: paste your input, choose encode or decode, and copy the result.