HTML Entity Encoder

How to Use

1. Choose the mode: click Encode to convert text to HTML entities, or Decode to convert entities back to text.
2. In encode mode, select an encoding mode from the dropdown: special chars only (named, numeric, or hex) or all characters (named, decimal, or hex).
3. Type or paste your text into the input field. The tool processes your input automatically with a 200ms debounce.
4. View the result in the output field. The output is read-only and can be copied or downloaded.
5. Use the Copy button to copy the output to your clipboard, or Download to save it as a text file.
6. Click Swap to move the output into the input field and switch modes — handy for round-trip testing.
7. Click Load Example to try the tool with sample HTML containing special characters and symbols.
8. Click Clear to reset both input and output fields.

Named vs Numeric Entities

Named entities like © and € are easier to read and remember, making them ideal for hand-written HTML and documentation. However, named entities only exist for a limited set of characters — roughly 250 in the HTML5 specification. For any character without a named entity, you must use the numeric form.

Numeric entities (&#nnn;) and hex entities (&#xHH;) can represent any Unicode character, from ASCII (0–127) to the full Unicode range (0–0x10FFFF). This makes them universally applicable. Hex entities are particularly popular in security contexts and XML documents because they are compact and unambiguous. Both decimal and hex forms produce identical results in the browser.

When choosing which mode to use, consider your audience. For human-readable HTML source code, named entities are preferable. For programmatic generation or when you need to encode characters beyond the named set, numeric or hex entities are the way to go. Our tool supports all three modes plus an “all characters” option that encodes every non-ASCII character, not just the five special HTML characters.

Common Use Cases

• XSS prevention — Encode user-generated content before displaying it in HTML to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Encoding <, >, and & ensures that user input is treated as text, not as executable HTML.
• Displaying HTML code in HTML — If you want to show HTML tags on a web page (like in a tutorial), you must encode the < and > characters so the browser displays them instead of interpreting them as tags.
• Special symbols in content — Insert copyright (©), trademark (™), registered (®), currency symbols (€, £, ¥), mathematical symbols (±, ×, ÷), and typographic marks (—, –, …, «, ») without needing a rich text editor.
• Email and XML content— Some XML parsers and email clients require certain characters to be entity-encoded to avoid parsing errors, especially the ampersand (&) and angle brackets (<, >).
• Debugging entity-encoded text — Decode text that has been entity-encoded (perhaps by a CMS, framework, or API) to verify the original content and check for encoding issues or double-encoding bugs.
• Internationalization — Encode non-Latin characters and symbols for use in environments that may not support UTF-8, ensuring content displays correctly across all platforms.