HTML Entity Converter

About HTML entity converter

The HTML entity converter turns characters that have special meaning in markup into safe entity codes, and turns entity codes back into readable text. The Text to HTML Entities tab handles the encoding side, and HTML Entities to Text handles decoding. It helps when you must show code samples on a page or clean up text that arrived with escaped characters.

How to use it

1. Open the tab you need: Text to HTML Entities or HTML Entities to Text.
2. Paste your content into the input box, labeled Text to Encode or HTML Entities to Decode.
3. Click Convert to HTML Entities or Convert to Text.
4. Copy the result from the output card, titled HTML Entities or Decoded Text.

Encoding a snippet that mixes markup, an ampersand, a quote and a symbol

<a href="/?a=1&b=2">Tom & Jerry's ©</a>

<a href="/?a=1&b=2">Tom & Jerry's ©</a>

When to use it

• Displaying a block of HTML source inside a blog post or documentation page without the browser rendering it.
• Escaping user-supplied text before placing it into an attribute in a hand-built template.
• Decoding a scraped or exported string full of amp and quot sequences into normal reading text.
• Converting copyright, registered, trademark and currency symbols into named entities for legacy systems.

Questions about HTML entity converter

Which characters does the encoder replace?

Exactly eleven: the ampersand, less-than, greater-than, double quote and single quote, plus the euro, pound, yen, copyright, registered and trademark symbols. Accented letters and emoji are left as typed.

Why is the apostrophe written as a number entity?

The single quote becomes the numeric code 39 rather than a named entity, because the named apos form is not recognized by every older HTML parser. The numeric form works everywhere.

Which entities can the decoder read?

Any the browser knows, since it uses the browser's own HTML parser. That covers named ones such as nbsp and hellip as well as decimal and hexadecimal codes like 8364 and x20AC.

What happens if I encode text twice?

The ampersands from the first pass are encoded again, producing amp-amp sequences that display as literal entity text. Encode once, and decode the same number of times you encoded.

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