Certain characters — like <, >, and & — have special meaning in HTML and can break page rendering or create security vulnerabilities if inserted into a page directly. HTML entities are safe, escaped representations of these characters (e.g. &lt; for <) that display correctly without being interpreted as code.

• Paste text or HTML into the input box.
• Click "Encode" to convert special characters into safe HTML entities, or "Decode" to reverse it.
• Click "Copy Output" to copy the result.

Preventing Broken Layouts

If you want to display code snippets or symbols like < and > on a webpage as literal text (not as HTML tags), they must be encoded, or the browser will try to interpret them as markup.

Security: Preventing XSS

Encoding user-submitted content before displaying it on a page is a fundamental defense against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious code could otherwise be injected and executed in a visitor's browser.

Displaying Special Characters

Symbols like copyright marks, currency signs, or accented letters can be represented reliably with HTML entities across different systems and encodings.

Is this the same as URL encoding?
No, HTML entity encoding and URL encoding solve different problems — the first protects HTML markup, the second protects URL structure. They use different encoding formats.

Is my text sent to your server?
No, encoding and decoding happen entirely in your browser using JavaScript.