HTML entities

Escaping replaces the characters that would otherwise be read as markup. Text content escapes &, < and >, which is all that text between tags needs. Attribute value also escapes both quote marks, so the result is safe to drop inside "…" or '…'. Everything non-ASCII adds every character above 7-bit ASCII, which is what you want for a file that may be served without a declared UTF-8 encoding — and nowhere else, since a UTF-8 page carries é perfectly well. Named entities are used where a standard short name exists; tick the box to get numeric ones such as é throughout. Characters outside the basic plane, emoji among them, are written as one numeric entity for the whole character rather than as two halves of a surrogate pair.

Decoding is done by the browser's own HTML parser, through DOMParser, so every named entity the HTML standard defines is understood — all two thousand-odd of them — along with decimal and hexadecimal numeric forms. That is a parser reading a string, not a page being built: nothing in what you paste is loaded or run, no script executes, no image is fetched, and no markup is rendered. Tags are left as text rather than stripped: pasting <b> gives you <b> back, because this page converts entities and does not edit HTML.

Two details that trip people up, and the page names both when it sees them. HTML's own rules let some entities be written without the closing semicolon, so &ampfoo decodes to &foo; and text that was escaped twice decodes to something still holding <, which the page points out rather than leave you puzzling. Each side is capped at 200,000 characters.

Everything runs in this tab. Nothing is uploaded and nothing you paste is stored; the Dark button keeps its own setting in this browser's local storage.