HTML entity converter
What Are HTML Entities?
Special characters in HTML must be written as entities: < for <, & for &, " for ". Without them, the browser interprets your text as markup — which is both a rendering bug and the mechanism behind XSS attacks.
When to Convert
Displaying code samples on a webpage, showing user input safely, writing documentation about HTML itself, or preparing text for XML feeds. Encode on output, not on input — store raw text, escape at render time.
How to Use the HTML Entity Converter
Convert special characters into HTML entities so code samples display correctly on web pages instead of being interpreted by the browser.
- Paste the text or code snippet you want to display safely.
- The tool encodes characters like the ampersand, less-than, greater-than, quotes, and apostrophes into entities such as
&,<, and>. - Copy the encoded output and place it inside your HTML page.
Example
<div class="box"> → <div class="box">, which renders visibly as code instead of becoming an actual div element.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I need to encode these characters?
Browsers treat < and > as the start and end of tags. Encoding them lets you show code on a page without the browser executing it.
Does this protect against security issues?
Encoding user-supplied text as entities is a core defense against cross-site scripting (XSS), because injected markup renders as harmless visible text.
Can I convert entities back to characters?
Decoding is the reverse operation: entities like & are translated back into plain characters when you need the original text restored.