HTML encode and decode online using this free, browser-based tool that converts special characters to HTML entities and back. Paste any text containing characters like angle brackets, ampersands, or quotes and get the safely encoded version instantly. No signup required, useful for preparing content for HTML insertion, sanitizing user input examples, or debugging entity rendering.
HTML Entities tool is a free browser-based encoder and decoder for HTML character entities. In HTML documents, certain characters have special meaning and must be represented as entities to appear literally on the page: the less-than sign must be written as < to avoid being interpreted as a tag opening, the ampersand as & to avoid starting an entity reference, and quotation marks as " or ' in attribute values. This tool encodes any text by replacing these characters with their HTML entity equivalents, and decodes entity-encoded HTML back to plain text. It is used by web developers writing HTML template strings in code, technical writers preparing HTML content, and anyone who needs to safely display code examples or special characters in web pages. No account or installation is required.
HTML entity encoding is essential whenever user-generated content or code samples are displayed in a web page. Without encoding, a user-submitted comment containing a less-than sign followed by a script tag could inject executable JavaScript into the page, which is the fundamental mechanism of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Properly encoding user input before inserting it into HTML ensures that any characters that would otherwise be interpreted as markup are rendered as literal text instead. HTML Entities tool helps developers verify that encoding is applied correctly by showing the exact entity representation of any input string. It is also useful for preparing HTML code examples for display on documentation sites, blog posts, and tutorials: a code snippet containing HTML tags must have its angle brackets entity-encoded before being placed in the page HTML, otherwise the browser will try to render the tags rather than display them as text. The decoder direction is equally useful: reading entity-encoded HTML in source code is difficult because &lt;div&gt; is much harder to parse visually than <div>. Pasting encoded content into the decoder returns the original human-readable form for easier inspection. The tool handles named entities (<, &, ", ', ), numeric decimal entities (<), and numeric hexadecimal entities (<). It runs free in the browser without installation.