HTML Entity Decoder
Convert &, é and 😀 style entities back into the characters they stand for.
Your data stays on your device
Input — Escaped
- characters
- 0
- lines
- 0
- size
- 0 B
Output — Text
- characters
- 0
- lines
- 0
- size
- 0 B
Options
About this tool
Text that has passed through a CMS, a scraper or an over-eager sanitiser often arrives full of entities. Reading it means decoding it, and a naive find-and-replace only covers the handful of entities you thought of.
This decoder resolves named entities, decimal references and hexadecimal references, including astral-plane characters such as emoji. Repeated decoding is available for text that was escaped more than once.
How to use this tool
- Paste text containing HTML entities.
- Enable repeated decoding if the content was escaped multiple times.
- Press Decode.
- Copy the plain text result.
Key features
- Named entities resolved through the standard HTML entity set
- Decimal and hexadecimal numeric references supported
- Astral-plane characters such as emoji decoded correctly
- Repeated decoding with a pass limit and a pass counter
- Unknown entities left untouched instead of being dropped
- Whitespace and line structure preserved
Example
Input — HTML entities
café & bärOutput — Text
café & bärGood to know
- Decoded content is plain text, not sanitised HTML. Do not insert it into a page without escaping it again.
- Entities that were never valid are left as-is, since guessing would corrupt data.
- Repeated decoding can over-decode text that legitimately contains an ampersand sequence.
Frequently asked questions
What does & mean?
Text that was escaped twice. Each pass converted & into &. Repeated decoding resolves it in one step.
Are numeric references supported?
Yes, both decimal such as é and hexadecimal such as é, including values above the basic multilingual plane.
Is decoded output safe to render?
No. Decoding is the opposite of escaping, so the result may contain active markup. Escape it again before inserting it into a page.
Why was an entity left alone?
Because it is not a recognised entity. Leaving it intact preserves the original data rather than silently discarding it.
Your data stays on your device
Your data is processed locally in your browser and is not uploaded to our server. This page keeps working after you go offline, because there is nothing to send.