HTML Entity Encoder

An HTML entity encoder converts special characters into the escape sequences HTML uses to represent them safely, and decodes those sequences back to plain text. A handful of characters carry structural meaning in HTML: the ampersand starts an entity, the less-than and greater-than signs delimit tags, and quotes delimit attribute values. If you drop a raw < or & into page content or an attribute, the browser may misread it as markup, breaking the layout or, worse, executing injected script. Encoding replaces those characters with safe equivalents so the browser renders them as literal text. This tool works in both directions. Encoding turns characters like &, <, >, and quotes into their entity forms, and decoding turns entity strings back into the original characters, which is useful for cleaning up scraped or copy-pasted web content. There are two entity styles, and both are supported. Named entities such as &amp; for ampersand and &copy; for the copyright sign are human-readable aliases. Numeric character references point at a Unicode code point directly, in decimal like &#169; or hexadecimal like &#xA9;, and any character has a numeric reference even when no named alias exists. A practical gotcha: HTML entity encoding is context-specific and is not a universal escape. Properly escaping the five HTML characters protects content placed in HTML body or attribute positions, but it does not make a string safe inside a URL (use URL encoding), inside a JavaScript string literal, or inside a SQL query. Each context has its own escaping rules, and using HTML entities in the wrong one either fails to protect or corrupts the data. Used in the right place, encoding the structural characters is a foundational defense against cross-site scripting. Everything runs locally in your browser, so the text you paste is never transmitted.