HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder — Encode Special Characters Free

Certain characters in HTML have special structural meaning — angle brackets (< and >) define tags, the ampersand (&) starts entity references, and quotation marks (") delimit attribute values. When these characters appear as literal content rather than HTML syntax, they must be encoded as HTML entities to prevent browsers from misinterpreting them as markup. Our free HTML entity encoder instantly converts your raw text into properly escaped HTML and decodes entity-laden strings back to readable text.

Why HTML Entity Encoding Matters for Security

Failing to encode user-supplied input before inserting it into HTML is the root cause of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) — one of the most prevalent and dangerous web security vulnerabilities. If a user enters <script>alert("XSS")</script> into a comment field and your application inserts it into the page without encoding, the browser executes it as JavaScript.

Properly encoding the output transforms the attack string into <script>alert("XSS")</script> — which the browser renders harmlessly as visible text. Our encode HTML entities tool is invaluable for testing your application's XSS defences, auditing template output, and generating correctly escaped content for static HTML files.

Common HTML Special Characters & Their Entities

The five characters that must always be encoded in HTML content are:

• & → & — must be encoded first to avoid double-encoding other entities
• < → < — prevents browser from interpreting the next characters as a tag
• > → > — closes potential open tags
• " → " — required inside double-quoted attributes
• ' → ' or ' — required inside single-quoted attributes

Beyond these five critical characters, our HTML entity decoder online also handles named entities for typographic characters — em dash (— → —), non-breaking space ( ), copyright symbol (© → ©), registered trademark (® → ®), and hundreds more defined in the HTML5 specification.

Decoding Entities — Reading Encoded HTML

When reviewing HTML source code from a CMS, scraping a web page, or reading server-rendered API responses, you'll frequently encounter entity-encoded text that's difficult to read as-is. A product description returned from an API as Tom’s Café — Est. 1985 is immediately readable once decoded to Tom's Café — Est. 1985. Our decoder tool handles both named entity references (—) and numeric character references (— and —) in a single pass.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)