What is the difference between escaping and full entity encoding?

Escaping touches only the five characters that break markup: ampersand, less-than, greater-than, double-quote and apostrophe. Full encoding converts every reserved or non-ASCII character (accents, currency, emoji) into a named or numeric reference so the text survives any encoding.

What are named versus numeric HTML entities?

A named entity uses a readable label such as © for the copyright sign. A numeric character reference uses the Unicode code point, either decimal like © or hexadecimal like ©. They render identically; named entities are easier to read while numeric references work for any character.

Which characters must always be escaped in HTML?

Inside HTML you must escape the ampersand and the angle brackets, and inside attribute values you must also escape quotes. This tool escapes ampersand, less-than, greater-than, double-quote and apostrophe, which is the safe set for both body text and attributes.

Does decoding run the HTML, so is it safe?

Yes, it is safe. The decoder is a pure string parser that maps each entity to its character. It never inserts your input into the page or DOM, so no script or markup in your text can execute.

Does this handle emoji and other characters above U+FFFF?

Yes. Encoding iterates by Unicode code point, so astral characters such as emoji are handled as single units and produce a correct numeric reference. Decoding accepts those numeric references and rebuilds the original character.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Every conversion happens locally in your browser using built-in JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server, logged or stored.

HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

Q: What are named versus numeric HTML entities?

A named entity uses a readable label such as &copy; for the copyright sign. A numeric character reference uses the Unicode code point, either decimal like &#169; or hexadecimal like &#xA9;. They render identically; named entities are easier to read while numeric references work for any character.

An HTML entity encoder and decoder for developers, writers and content editors who need to move text safely in and out of HTML. It does three jobs in one place: escape the reserved characters that would otherwise break your markup, encode any text into named or numeric character references, and decode existing entities back into plain readable text. A searchable reference table of common named entities sits underneath so you can look up, copy or insert the exact code for a symbol without leaving the page.

How it works

HTML treats a handful of characters specially. The ampersand starts an entity, the angle brackets open and close tags, and quotes delimit attribute values. If those characters appear literally in your content the browser can misread them, so they have to be written as entities. The simplest case is escaping: this tool replaces only the five reserved characters with their safe forms, leaving everything else untouched. That is the form you want when you are injecting user text into a template.

Full encoding goes further. It walks your text one Unicode code point at a time and converts every reserved or non-ASCII character into an entity. When a readable named reference exists it uses that; otherwise it falls back to a numeric character reference, which you can request in decimal or hexadecimal. Because it iterates by code point, characters outside the basic plane — including emoji — are encoded correctly as single units rather than broken surrogate halves.

Decoding reverses the process with a pure parser. It scans for both named references and numeric references in decimal or hex, looks each one up, and substitutes the matching character. Crucially it never writes your text into the page, so decoding untrusted input carries no script-execution risk. Anything it does not recognise is reported and left exactly as it was, so you never silently lose data.

Example

Encode all entities (named preferred) converts the accents and symbols too: the copyright sign becomes the copyright named entity, the euro sign becomes the euro named entity, and accented letters fall back to numeric references such as the one for é.
Decode takes that fully encoded string and returns the original text byte-for-byte.

Use the Swap button to feed a result straight back as input and flip direction, which makes round-trip testing a single click. Every figure and character is processed in your browser — nothing is uploaded or stored.