Paste your HTML-encoded text below to convert entities back to readable characters.
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What are HTML Entities?
HTML entities are special codes used to represent reserved characters and symbols in HTML. They ensure that characters are displayed correctly, especially when those characters (like < or >) have special meaning in HTML code.
Entities begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). For example, to display a less-than sign, you would use <.
Common HTML Entities Reference
| Character | Entity Name | Entity Number | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| < | < | < | Less-than sign |
| > | > | > | Greater-than sign |
| & | & | & | Ampersand |
| " | " | " | Double quotation mark |
| Non-breaking space | |||
| © | © | © | Copyright symbol |
| ® | ® | ® | Registered trademark |
| € | € | € | Euro currency symbol |
How HTML Entity Decoding Impacts SEO
While often a technical detail, entity decoding has a direct impact on Search Engine Optimization. Understanding this helps ensure your content is properly crawled, indexed, and ranked.
Content Readability for Search Bots
Search engines can decode common entities, but excessive or improper use can create ambiguity. Decoding content lets you see the text exactly as a user and search bot would, verifying that your keywords are present in their raw, readable form.
Accuracy in Structured Data (Schema)
Structured data must be perfectly formatted for rich snippets. An encoded character in a product name (e.g., "Toys & Stuff") can cause parsing errors. Decoding helps you audit and clean your structured data to ensure it’s valid.
Practical Use Cases for Decoding
Cleaning Web-Scraped Data
When you scrape data, the resulting HTML is often full of entities. Use this tool to quickly clean and normalize scraped content into a readable, usable format.
Analyzing User-Generated Content
Content from forms or reviews often has characters escaped for security. Decoding this text allows you to properly moderate, display, and analyze user submissions.
Debugging API Responses
When working with APIs that return JSON or XML, strings may contain encoded HTML. Pasting the response here helps you verify the actual content and debug issues.
Frequently Asked Questions
HTML entity decoding is the process of converting special HTML codes (entities) back into their original characters. For example, converting "<" back to "<".
You should decode entities when you need to read or edit encoded text, analyze source code, debug website rendering issues, or clean data scraped from the web.
Encoding converts special characters into HTML entities (e.g., "<" becomes "<"). Decoding reverses this process, converting entities back to their original characters.
Yes, it is 100% safe. All decoding happens directly in your browser. Your data is never sent to our servers, ensuring complete privacy and security.
Absolutely. You can paste the entire content of an HTML file into the input box. The tool will decode all entities it finds while preserving the HTML tags and structure.
Yes, it supports named entities (e.g., ©), decimal numeric entities (e.g., ©), and hexadecimal numeric entities (e.g., ©).
The replacement character (�) appears if you try to decode an invalid or unsupported entity code that doesn't correspond to a known character in the standard UTF-8 character set.
Yes. Attackers sometimes encode malicious code (e.g., for XSS attacks) to hide it. Decoding reveals the true payload, making it a useful first step in security analysis. Always handle untrusted data with caution.
HTML decoding handles entities like & within a webpage's content. URL decoding handles percent-encoded characters like %20 (a space) found in web addresses (URLs). They are two different encoding systems for different purposes.
We also provide a companion HTML Entity Encoder tool to perform the reverse operation. It's perfect for making your text safe to include in HTML code.