HTML Entity Encoder

1. Choose Encode to turn text into HTML entities, or Decode to turn entities like < and ₹ back into normal characters.
2. Type or paste your text into the input box. The result updates as you type.
3. When encoding, pick the Entity style (named é, decimal é or hex é) and What to encode: only the five HTML special characters, or every non-ASCII character as well.
4. When decoding text that was escaped twice (it shows <), switch on Fix double-encoded text.
5. Tap Copy. To find a symbol such as ₹, ©, → or a non-breaking space, search the Entity reference table and tap a code to copy it.

What are HTML entities?

An HTML entity is a short code that stands for one character. It starts with & and ends with ;. Browsers need them for characters that have a special meaning in HTML: if you write <b> in a page, the browser treats it as a bold tag; to show it, you write <b>. Entities also let you write any Unicode character, such as the rupee sign ₹, in plain ASCII text. This HTML entity encoder converts text to entities and back.

There are three ways to write the same character:

The decimal number is the character's Unicode code point, and the hex form is the same number in base 16. The Indian rupee sign is U+20B9, which is 8377 in decimal. It has no named entity, so use ₹, or just type ₹ in a UTF-8 page.

Worked example

To show this line as text on a web page, without the browser treating it as a link:

encode it with Only & < > " ' and Named:

The rupee sign stays as it is, which is fine in any page saved as UTF-8. If the text must be pure ASCII (an old database column, a legacy email template), choose every non-ASCII character too and ₹ becomes ₹.

Which characters must be encoded?

• & and < in normal text, always.
• " inside attribute values wrapped in double quotes, and ' inside single-quoted ones.
• > is not strictly required, but encoding it is common and harmless.

Encoding these five characters is also the basic defence against cross-site scripting (XSS) when you put user-supplied text into HTML. In real code, use your framework's escaping (React, Angular, Django and Blade templates do it automatically) rather than encoding by hand.

How decoding works here

The decoder follows the HTML5 rules that browsers use. All named entities are recognised, including newer HTML5 names like ✓. A few old names such as &amp, &nbsp and &copy work even without the semicolon, exactly as in a browser. Numbers 128–159 are read as Windows-1252 characters, so – becomes an en dash (–), a common leftover from text pasted out of old Word documents. Unknown names are left untouched and listed so you can check them.

Tips

• Seeing & or < on a live page means the text was encoded twice. Use Fix double-encoded text to recover it, then find where your code escapes it the second time.
•   keeps two words on the same line, useful for "₹&nbsp;500" or "Dr.&nbsp;Rao".
• Entities aren't encryption. Encoding an email address as entities only stops the simplest scrapers.