HTML Entities Converter

Special characters breaking your HTML, or entities showing up as code?

Two problems send people looking for an entity converter. One is text that contains < or & and needs escaping before it goes into markup. The other is copy full of codes like &rsquo; or &#038; that needs to become readable again. This page handles both directions with a single input box and two buttons. Decoding relies on the browser's built-in parser rather than a lookup list, and every conversion happens locally.

Step by step

1. Paste the text or snippet you are working with into the upper box.
2. To make it safe for HTML, press the Encode button (the one with the arrow pointing right).
3. To make codes human-readable, press the Decode button (arrow pointing left).
4. Take the converted version from the lower, read-only box, or press Copy.
5. Use the cheat sheet at the bottom when you only need to look up one common entity.

What to watch for

Encoding here is minimal by design. It converts &, <, >, straight double quotes and apostrophes, which covers body text and quoted attribute values alike, and nothing else. Characters like é, ñ or ™ pass through unchanged, which is correct on a UTF-8 page, and so do non-breaking spaces, which look like ordinary spaces in the output. If you need them visible in the source, swap them for &nbsp; by hand.

Decoding is safe to use on pasted markup. The input is handled as text, so tags come back exactly as you typed them, only the entities change, and no script or event handler in the pasted code can run. It will not strip HTML for you, though; if you want the tags removed, that takes another tool or a find and replace.

Questions people ask

Why does my page title show &amp; in search results?

Usually the text was encoded twice, often once by a CMS and again by a plugin or template. Decode the stored value once, check it reads correctly, and let only one layer do the escaping.

Should I use entities for accented letters?

Not if the page declares UTF-8, which is the norm today. Type the characters directly. Entities for letters are harmless, but they make source harder to read and edit.

Do HTML entities work inside JSON-LD?

No. The contents of a script element are not entity-decoded, so an &amp; inside structured data stays as those five characters in the value. Use the plain character, and escape only what JSON itself requires.

Further reading: Title Tag and JSON-LD Structured Data: Complete Implementation Guide.

The same tool is also published on the static mirror at seoprocheck.github.io, and the rest of the set is on the free tools page.