HTML Encoder & Decoder

It replaces characters that have a special meaning in HTML — chiefly &, <, >, " and ' — with their entity equivalents (&amp;, &lt;, &gt;, &quot; and &#39;). The browser then shows those characters as plain text instead of trying to interpret them as markup. So if you want a page to literally display “<div>” rather than start a div element, you encode it first. Decoding is the reverse: it turns the entities back into the original characters.

Any time you want to show code or symbols as text rather than have the browser act on them — a tutorial that prints HTML tags, a code snippet inside a blog post, or a value you are inserting into an attribute. It is also essential when you place untrusted text (a name, a comment, a search term) into a page: encoding the special characters stops that text from being treated as markup. The numeric form is handy for emails and older systems that mangle accented or non-ASCII characters.

They are three ways of writing the same character. A named entity uses a readable label, such as &copy; for ©. A decimal numeric entity uses the character’s code point in base 10, like &#169;. A hexadecimal one uses base 16, like &#xA9;. Browsers understand all three, so the choice is about readability and compatibility — names are clearest, while numeric forms work for every character even when no name exists.

Usually not. A modern, UTF-8 page can show café, € or 😀 directly with no encoding at all, which keeps the source readable. Switch on “encode all non-ASCII” only when something downstream cannot be trusted with UTF-8 — for example an email template, a legacy CMS, or a system that strips accents. For everyday web pages, encoding just the five HTML-special characters is the right, minimal choice.

Encoding the HTML-special characters is the core defence when you drop untrusted text into ordinary page content or into a quoted attribute value, and this tool produces exactly that. But it is not a complete answer on its own: text placed inside a URL, a piece of inline JavaScript, or a CSS block needs a different kind of escaping that matches that context. Treat this tool as the right first step for HTML context, not a one-size-fits-all security fix.

Yes. The encoding and decoding both run entirely in your browser with plain JavaScript — nothing you type is sent anywhere, and you can confirm that in your browser’s network panel. The optional share link keeps your text in the URL itself rather than on a server, and the on-device history can be cleared at any time. Nothing leaves your machine.