Question 1

What are HTML entities?

Accepted Answer

HTML entities are special text sequences used to represent characters that have a meaning in HTML markup, such as less-than and greater-than signs, or characters not easily typed on a keyboard. They start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon, like & for & or < for <.

Question 2

When should I encode HTML entities?

Accepted Answer

Encode any text that will be inserted into an HTML document to prevent characters like <, >, and & from being interpreted as markup. This is especially important when displaying user-supplied content to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

Question 3

What is the difference between named and numeric entities?

Accepted Answer

Named entities use a short descriptive name, like " for a double quote. Numeric entities use the decimal or hexadecimal code point of the character, like &#34; or &#x22;. Both forms are equivalent and supported by all browsers.

Question 4

Does this tool handle all HTML entities?

Accepted Answer

The tool encodes the five characters that must always be escaped in HTML: &, <, >, ", and '. It also decodes all named entities defined in HTML5 as well as decimal and hexadecimal numeric entities.

Question 5

Is my text sent anywhere when I encode or decode?

Accepted Answer

No. All encoding and decoding runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing you type or paste is transmitted to any server.

HTML Entities

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Sanitize user input

Read HTML source

Template debugging

Free HTML entity encoder and decoder

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