Escape special characters to their HTML entity equivalents, or unescape HTML entities back to plain text. Supports named entities (&, <, >), decimal numeric references (<), and hexadecimal references (<). Everything runs in your browser — your data never leaves your machine.
| Character | Named | Decimal | Hex | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| & | & | & | & | Ampersand |
| < | < | < | < | Less-than sign |
| > | > | > | > | Greater-than sign |
| " | " | " | " | Quotation mark |
| ' | ' | ' | ' | Apostrophe |
|   |   | Non-breaking space | |
| © | © | © | © | Copyright sign |
| ® | ® | ® | ® | Registered trademark |
| ™ | ™ | ™ | ™ | Trademark symbol |
| € | € | € | € | Euro sign |
HTML entities are escape sequences used to represent characters that have special meaning in HTML or that cannot easily be typed. An entity begins with an ampersand (&) and ends with a semicolon (;). For example, the less-than sign (<) must be written as < inside HTML, because the browser would otherwise interpret it as the start of an HTML tag.
There are three types of HTML character references: named entities like &, decimal numeric references like &, and hexadecimal references like &. All three forms produce identical output in the browser. Named entities are easier to read, while numeric references support any Unicode code point — even characters that have no named entity defined.
<pre> blocks) in HTML<, >, and & as visible text&, ©&#x…; prefix (e.g. <)htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities()textContent over innerHTML for safetyThe most common HTML entity mistake is double-encoding: running already-encoded text through an encoder again, turning & into &amp;. This happens when a templating engine and application code both escape the same value. Always escape exactly once, at the point where data is inserted into HTML output.
A second pitfall is context confusion: HTML entities are not the right tool for URL-encoding (use percent-encoding instead) or for JSON strings (use JSON escape sequences). Each context — HTML, URLs, JavaScript strings — has its own escaping rules and they must not be mixed. This tool handles HTML entity encoding and decoding only; for URL encoding use the URL Encode / Decode tool, and for Base64 use the Base64 tool.