HTML escape tool and common entity decoder

Worked result

The paragraph markup becomes escaped text rather than a live element.

1. Replace ampersands first so newly introduced entities are not double-escaped.
2. Escape <, >, double quotes and apostrophes.
3. On decoding, replace recognized references once, without reparsing the result.

Show markup as visible text

To display a literal paragraph tag in an HTML text node, escape its delimiters and ampersand rather than interpreting the tag.

Input:
<p title="A&B">Hello</p>

Escaped:
&lt;p title=&quot;A&amp;B&quot;&gt;Hello&lt;/p&gt;

Decoding &amp;lt; once produces &lt;, not a less-than sign. Repeated decoding changes the result and can create dangerous surprises when data later reaches an HTML sink.

Encoding is specific to the output context

The encoder replaces &, <, >, double quote and apostrophe. The decoder supports amp, lt, gt, quot, apos, nbsp, copy, reg, trade and euro, plus valid decimal and hexadecimal numeric references ending in semicolons. Unknown named entities remain unchanged.

Numeric decoding requires a valid nonzero Unicode scalar value and rejects control-code references that HTML would reinterpret. This intentionally limited decoder is not a complete HTML parser. It does not decode all historical browser error-recovery rules.

Escapes: & → &amp;   < → &lt;   > → &gt;
Double quote → &quot;   Apostrophe → &#39;
Numeric examples: &#65; → A; &#x1F600; → 😀

Input limits and common mistakes

Limit: 200,000 input characters. Named references require their exact supported name and a semicolon. Invalid, control or surrogate numeric references cause an error. Unrecognized named references are left as written.

HTML text escaping is not a sanitizer for arbitrary HTML and does not make text safe in JavaScript, CSS, SQL or every attribute context. Use the framework’s context-aware escaping in an actual application. No input is rendered as markup or fetched as a resource here.

Questions about html escape and entity decoder

Sources and verification

These references explain the formulas or formats. The worked examples above were created for this tool and checked against independent calculations or format round trips. AI-assisted development does not imply a named human expert review.

• WHATWG HTML: named character references — The standard entity names and corresponding characters.
• WHATWG HTML: numeric character-reference rules — Numeric reference validity and special control-code handling.

Published 2026-10-23. Examples are illustrations, not measurements of a service or claims about search rankings.

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