HTML Encoder & Decoder

Certain characters have structural meaning in HTML. An angle bracket starts a tag, an ampersand starts an entity, and quotes delimit attribute values. To display those characters as text rather than have the browser act on them, they must be written as entities: less-than becomes <, ampersand becomes &, and so on. This tool converts in both directions.

Encoding is the safety-critical direction. Any text that comes from a user and ends up inside a page must be escaped, otherwise a submitted script tag runs as code. That class of bug is cross-site scripting, and escaping is the standard defence. Use encode mode to see exactly what a value should look like once escaped.

Decoding is the everyday direction. Content pulled from feeds, exports and databases often arrives with entities still in it, so a headline reads with & in the middle of it. Decode mode turns those back into the characters they represent, including numeric entities and the full set of named ones.

• Encode the five structural characters, or every non-ASCII character
• Decode named entities such as   and ©
• Decode numeric entities in decimal and hexadecimal form
• Switch direction without retyping
• Live conversion as you type
• Copy the result in one click

The html encoder & decoder is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Escaping user input before inserting it into a page
• Showing code samples inside an HTML document
• Cleaning up content exported from a CMS with entities left in
• Preparing text for an HTML email template
• Checking how a value will render once escaped