HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder
Convert special characters to HTML entities and vice versa.
📖 Understanding HTML Entities and Why They Matter
HTML entities are special character codes that allow you to display reserved characters and symbols in web pages without causing conflicts with HTML markup. When browsers parse HTML documents, certain characters like less-than signs, greater-than signs, and ampersands have special meanings. If you want to display these characters as literal text rather than HTML code, you must convert them to their entity equivalents. Our free HTML Entity Encoder/Decoder tool makes this conversion instant and effortless, helping developers, content creators, and security professionals handle text safely.
This tool is essential for web development workflows, particularly when displaying user-generated content, showing code examples on websites, preparing content for databases, or sanitizing input to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. All processing happens directly in your browser, ensuring your data remains private and secure throughout the encoding or decoding process.
What Are HTML Entities?
HTML entities are text strings that begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). They represent characters that either have special meaning in HTML or cannot be easily typed on a standard keyboard. For example, the less-than sign (<) must be written as < to prevent browsers from interpreting it as the start of an HTML tag. Similarly, the ampersand itself must be written as & when you want it displayed as a literal character.
Complete HTML Entity Reference Table
| Character | Entity Name | Entity Number | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| < | < |
< |
Less than sign - opens HTML tags |
| > | > |
> |
Greater than sign - closes HTML tags |
| & | & |
& |
Ampersand - starts entity references |
| " | " |
" |
Double quotation mark |
| ' | ' |
' |
Single quotation mark/apostrophe |
|
  |
Non-breaking space | |
| © | © |
© |
Copyright symbol |
| ® | ® |
® |
Registered trademark symbol |
| ™ | ™ |
™ |
Trademark symbol |
| € | € |
€ |
Euro currency symbol |
| £ | £ |
£ |
British pound symbol |
| ¥ | ¥ |
¥ |
Japanese yen symbol |
🔐 Security Tip: Always encode user-generated content before displaying it in HTML to prevent XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks. When malicious users submit content containing script tags or event handlers, encoding converts these dangerous characters into harmless entity representations that display as text rather than executing as code.