What is an HTML Entity Converter?
An HTML entity converter transforms special characters into their HTML entity equivalents, making them safe to display in web pages without breaking your markup. Characters like less-than (<), greater-than (>), ampersand (&), and quotes need to be escaped when they appear in HTML content, otherwise browsers interpret them as code instead of text.
When you encode text, the tool replaces reserved characters with their entity codes. For example, the character "<" becomes <, and "&" becomes &. This process prevents conflicts with HTML tags and attributes, ensuring your content displays exactly as intended.
Decoding does the reverse—it converts entity codes back into readable characters. If you copy text from HTML source code, RSS feeds, or API responses, you'll often see entities like " or '. This tool cleans them up instantly, giving you plain, human-readable text.
Why You Need This Tool in 2026
HTML entity encoding remains essential for web developers, content managers, and SEO professionals. When you paste user-generated content into a CMS, add code examples to documentation, or display dynamic text in templates, unescaped special characters can break layouts, cause validation errors, or create security vulnerabilities.
Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and custom platforms often require encoded entities in certain fields. If you're building email templates, structured data, or meta tags, entities ensure quotes and angle brackets don't terminate attributes prematurely or close tags unexpectedly.
For developers debugging front-end issues, this tool saves time by instantly converting messy entity-filled strings back to readable format. Instead of manually decoding <div> in your head, paste it here and get clean HTML to analyze. It's also useful when working with XML, JSON responses, and any format that escapes HTML characters.
Common HTML Entities
< (Less Than)
Entity: < — Used to display the less-than symbol without starting an HTML tag. Essential when showing code snippets or mathematical expressions.
> (Greater Than)
Entity: > — Displays the greater-than symbol safely. Often paired with < when showing HTML or XML markup in documentation.
& (Ampersand)
Entity: & — The ampersand must be encoded because it begins every entity. Without encoding, browsers may misinterpret it as the start of an entity reference.
" (Double Quote)
Entity: " — Prevents quotes from closing HTML attributes prematurely. Critical when embedding text inside attribute values.
' (Single Quote / Apostrophe)
Entity: ' or ' — Useful when single quotes define attribute boundaries or appear in dynamic content.
How to Use This Tool
Converting HTML entities is straightforward with our browser-based tool. Follow these steps for instant results:
- Choose your mode: Click either "Encode" to convert special characters into HTML entities, or "Decode" to transform entity codes back into readable text.
- Paste your text: Drop plain HTML, code snippets, or entity-filled strings into the large input box. The tool handles any length, from single characters to entire documents.
- Enable "Auto convert" if you want instant results as you type. Disable it if you prefer to paste first and convert manually by clicking "Convert now."
- View your result in the output box on the right. The character count updates automatically so you can verify the conversion worked correctly.
- Click "Copy result" to instantly copy the converted text to your clipboard, ready to paste into your CMS, code editor, or documentation.
- Hit "Clear" anytime to reset both input and output fields for a fresh conversion.
All processing happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. No data is sent to external servers, ensuring your privacy and delivering instant results even on slower connections.
Common Use Cases
- CMS content fields: Encode user input or pasted content before saving to WordPress, Joomla, or custom CMS databases to prevent markup conflicts.
- Email templates: Ensure quotes and special characters in email HTML don't break template rendering across different email clients.
- Code documentation: Display HTML and XML examples in tutorials without the browser interpreting them as actual markup.
- SEO meta tags: Clean up descriptions and titles that contain quotes or ampersands so they validate correctly and display properly in search results.
- API responses: Decode entity-encoded JSON or XML responses to make data human-readable during debugging and testing.
- Form submissions: Encode user-generated text before inserting it into HTML templates to avoid accidental script injection or layout breaks.
Does Entity Encoding Prevent XSS?
HTML entity encoding is one layer of defense against cross-site scripting (XSS), but it's not a complete solution by itself. Encoding special characters helps prevent browsers from executing malicious scripts embedded in user input, but proper output escaping must happen at the application level.
When you insert user-generated content into HTML, your server-side code should automatically escape dangerous characters based on context—HTML body, attributes, JavaScript, CSS, or URLs each require different escaping rules. Entity encoding alone won't protect against all attack vectors.
Use this tool for display purposes, documentation, and content formatting. For production applications, rely on framework-level security functions like PHP's htmlspecialchars(), React's automatic escaping, or templating engines that handle context-aware escaping automatically.
Best Practices
- Always encode user input before displaying it in HTML contexts to prevent accidental markup injection.
- Use context-aware escaping in production code—HTML body encoding differs from attribute, JavaScript, and URL encoding.
- Don't double-encode. If your CMS or framework already escapes entities, encoding again creates double-escaped output like &lt;.
- Test across browsers when working with unusual Unicode characters or numeric entities to ensure consistent rendering.
- Keep entities readable in source code when possible—use named entities like © instead of numeric ones like © for better maintainability.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does an HTML entity converter do?
It converts reserved/special characters (like <, >, &, quotes) into HTML entities so they display safely in HTML, and it can also decode entities back to normal text.
When should I encode HTML entities?
Encode when inserting user text into HTML, CMS fields, templates, or code samples—especially if the text contains <, >, &, or quotes that could break markup.
Does this prevent XSS by itself?
Encoding entities helps avoid accidental markup injection in many display contexts, but proper output escaping and security practices are still required in apps.
Why doesn't it convert every character into an entity?
The encoder focuses on characters that typically need escaping in HTML. Normal letters/numbers usually remain unchanged.
Is my text uploaded or stored?
No. All conversion happens directly in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.
Privacy and Performance
All HTML entity conversion happens entirely in your web browser using JavaScript. Your input text never leaves your device or gets transmitted to our servers. This approach ensures maximum privacy and delivers instant results, even on slower internet connections.
The tool uses native browser DOM APIs to encode and decode entities, ensuring accuracy and compatibility across all modern browsers. Whether you're on desktop, mobile, or tablet, you'll experience fast, reliable conversions without installing any software or extensions.