HTML entity encoder & decoder

What it does

The HTML entity encoder escapes the characters that would otherwise be read as markup, so <script> becomes <script> and an ampersand becomes &. It can also encode every non-ASCII character, using a named entity such as é or — where one is common and a numeric reference such as ₹ otherwise, with an option to use numbers only. The decoder reverses all of it, including hexadecimal references like 🍺, and tells you if it met an entity name it does not know. Useful for template strings, RSS feeds, email HTML and checking what a page actually contains.

How to use it

1. Choose Encode to escape text before it goes into a page or template, or Decode to turn entities back into characters.
2. Paste the text. For encoding, decide whether to also encode non-ASCII characters and whether to use numeric references only.
3. Copy the result. The quick reference table under the output lists the handful of entities you need most often.

How to read the result

The entity count shows how much was escaped. Encoding a link such as <a href="/pricing?plan=pro&billing=yearly">Tom & Jerry's "best" deals – from £5 © 2026</a> produces 14 entities: the tag brackets, the quotes, two ampersands, an apostrophe and, with non-ASCII encoding on, the dash, pound sign and copyright symbol. The output is about 60 characters longer than the input, which is normal.

If the decoded output still contains something like &bogus;, the status badge says how many unknown names were left as they were. A browser would do the same, so the text would show literally on the page.

When you paste a snippet from a page's source and the decoder returns <p> tags, that text was double-escaped somewhere: encoded once by a CMS and again by a template. Decoding twice restores it, but the real fix is to escape once, at the point of output.

Template escaping is one of the basics we check in web app development. To work with the structure rather than the characters, try the HTML formatter.