HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder

Paste text on the left and the escaped or unescaped version appears on the right. Encoding always converts the five characters that can change the structure of a document: the ampersand, both angle brackets and both quote marks.

Named entities read better in source — © is obvious, © is not — but only a limited set has a name. Numeric form works for every character, which is what you want for anything outside ASCII. The mixed mode uses a name when one exists and a number otherwise.

Decoding leaves entities it does not recognise exactly as they are. Silently dropping an unknown name would damage the original text, and a stray ampersand in ordinary prose stays an ampersand.

The conversion is done with a lookup table, not by handing your text to the browser as HTML. That distinction matters: decoding through innerHTML would execute any script or event handler hidden in the input.

Nothing you paste is sent to a server. Everything happens inside your browser.