HTML Entity Converter

Encode text for safe embedding in HTML — choose how aggressive the encoding should be: escape only the special characters (& < > " '), every non-ASCII character (perfect for legacy charset documents), or literally every character. Output can use readable named entities (&copy;), decimal references (&#169;) or hex references (&#xA9;). Decode restores any of those forms back to plain text (numeric, named, and the legacy no-semicolon forms like &copy). The Reference tab is a searchable table of all 2,125 HTML5 named entities with decimal/hex codes — click a row to copy it. Everything runs locally — no upload, no server.
Mode:
Encode Options
Input Text
Output
Paste some text and press Process (or just start typing - the output updates live).
How to use: paste plain text on the left and it is encoded on the right, or switch to Decode to turn &copy;-style text back into characters. Hitting Process re-runs manually; the output area also refreshes live as you type. Note that Encode treats the input as raw text — if your text already contains entity sequences, encode them again if that is what you intend, otherwise use Decode first.
Named vs numeric entities

Named entities like &amp; read naturally; numeric forms like &#38; — or hex &#x26; — work for every character even when no name exists. Entities exist so markup characters can appear as text: without them, a lone < starts a tag and breaks the parse.

In practice only five characters must be escaped in HTML: < > & " ' — escaping the rest is readability, not safety.
Reference table: full HTML5 named character references — type to search, click a row to copy its entity code.
Tip: paste a single character to find its entity