Which characters must be escaped in HTML?

At minimum & (&), (>) in content, plus " (") and ' (') inside attribute values. Escaping these prevents markup injection and XSS when displaying user input.

What's the difference between named and numeric entities?

Named entities use mnemonics (© for ©); numeric ones use the Unicode code point (© or hex ©). Browsers accept both; numeric entities work for every character, while names exist only for a predefined set.

HTML Entity Encoder / Decoder

Convert special characters into HTML entities so they display as text instead of being interpreted as markup — and decode entity-laden HTML back to readable text. Handles the essential five (&, <, >, ", ') plus named entities like © and numeric references like —. Essential for displaying code snippets in HTML or cleaning scraped content.

Developer Tools

EncodeDecode

Also encode non-ASCII (é → é)

Raw text / HTML

Escaped output

&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com&quot;&gt;Tom &amp; Jerry&lt;/a&gt;

Private by default

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data is never uploaded to a server.

How to use

3 clear steps.

Choose Encode to escape special characters, or Decode to resolve entities.
Paste your text or HTML.
Copy the converted output.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

Which characters must be escaped in HTML?: At minimum & (&), < (<), and > (>) in content, plus " (") and ' (') inside attribute values. Escaping these prevents markup injection and XSS when displaying user input.
What's the difference between named and numeric entities?: Named entities use mnemonics (© for ©); numeric ones use the Unicode code point (© or hex ©). Browsers accept both; numeric entities work for every character, while names exist only for a predefined set.