HTML Entities

HTML Entity Encoder and Decoder

HTML entities are special character sequences used in HTML to safely display reserved and special characters.

When to encode / decode

• when inserting user-generated HTML into a page (XSS protection);
• when displaying code in the browser as text rather than markup;
• when decoding HTML responses from APIs or web scraping;
• when working with XML and HTML in templates.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What are HTML entities and why do they need to be encoded?

  HTML entities are special character sequences that the browser displays as characters rather than markup. For example, the less-than sign (<) is written as &lt;. Encoding is necessary to safely display user input, prevent XSS attacks and publish code examples on a page. Without encoding, the browser may break the layout or execute an unwanted script.

• What is the difference between an encoder and a decoder for special characters?

  An encoder converts plain text into HTML entities: the ampersand & becomes &amp;. A decoder does the reverse — it restores original characters from entities. Our tool on 101ip.ru handles both directions. Simply choose the conversion mode depending on what you need to do.

• Why does my text with &copy; display incorrectly in the browser?

  Most likely the text was encoded but the ampersand was not converted properly, or double-encoding occurred. Check whether you have a construction like &amp;amp;copy; instead of &amp;copy;. Use our decoder to clean the string. When inserting text into an HTML file, apply encoding only once per character.