HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

The HTML Entity Encoder and Decoder converts text to and from HTML entities — the escape sequences like &amp;, &lt;, &gt;, &quot;, and &#39; that let you safely display reserved HTML characters inside a web page without the browser misinterpreting them as markup. Paste plain text containing angle brackets, ampersands, or quotation marks and the tool converts them into their safe entity equivalents; paste entity-encoded text and it decodes back to readable characters. This is a daily tool for web developers embedding user-generated content, code samples, or documentation snippets into HTML templates. If you've ever pasted a code example into a blog post and watched the browser silently swallow a "<div>" tag because it was interpreted as real markup instead of displayed as text, you've hit exactly the problem this tool solves. Encoding the angle brackets as &lt;div&gt; forces the browser to render them as visible text rather than executing them as an element. This is also a core defense against basic cross-site scripting (XSS): any untrusted text that gets inserted into an HTML page should have its special characters entity-encoded first so that a malicious "<script>" tag ends up rendered as harmless text rather than executed as code. Technical writers, CMS users, and forum moderators use this tool to prepare code blocks, mathematical notation, or comparison symbols for publishing in systems that don't automatically escape input. It's also handy for decoding oddities you'll encounter when scraping or copying content from the web — RSS feeds, old CMS exports, and legacy databases frequently store text with entities like &amp;amp; (double-encoded ampersands) or &nbsp; for non-breaking spaces, and being able to quickly decode them back to plain text saves a lot of manual find-and-replace work. Keep in mind there's a difference between the small set of characters that must always be escaped for HTML safety — less-than, greater-than, ampersand, and quotation marks — and the much larger set of "named" entities that exist purely for convenience, like &copy; for a copyright symbol or &hearts; for a heart. This tool handles both directions: converting reserved characters for safety, and converting readable symbols into their named or numeric entity form when you need to guarantee they render correctly across older browsers or strict XML parsers. Pair this tool with the JSON Formatter when working with API responses that embed HTML, or the Regex Tester when you need to strip or validate entities programmatically. As always, everything runs locally in your browser — no HTML snippet, code sample, or user content you paste is transmitted anywhere, which is particularly important if you're sanitising real user submissions that might contain sensitive or unvetted data.