Cleaning up scraped text
Content pulled from page source often carries entities. Decoding restores the readable characters in one step.
HTML Entity Decoder
Decode HTML entities back into plain text in your browser, including numeric and named forms.
Maintained by Roshan.
Use HTML Entity Decoder
Converts escaped html to text in this tab, with nothing sent anywhere.
Runs entirely on your deviceThe conversion happens in this browser tab. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored, which is worth knowing for anything you would not paste into a search box.
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Browse all developer and data toolsAbout HTML Entity Decoder
HTML entities are how a web page smuggles special characters safely into its markup, and decoding them turns that page-safe form back into the plain text a person or a program actually wants. You meet encoded entities constantly: copied out of page source, extracted from a scraped document, returned by an API that escaped its output, or sitting in a data export where an ampersand has become the five characters that spell it out. Reading that by eye is tedious and error-prone. This decoder handles the three forms entities take - named ones like the ampersand and less-than, decimal numeric references, and hexadecimal numeric references - and turns each back into the single character it represents, so the text reads normally again.
Using HTML Entity Decoder
- Named entities such as the ampersand, less-than, greater-than and quotes are recognised and replaced with the characters they stand for.
- Decimal numeric references, written as a number between an ampersand-hash and a semicolon, are converted to the character at that code point.
- Hexadecimal numeric references, marked with an x, are converted the same way from their hex code point.
- Characters that are not part of an entity are left untouched, so ordinary text passes through cleanly.
- The result is the plain text the entities were standing in for.
Where html entity decoder helps
Reading an API response
Some APIs escape their text output. Decode it to see the real values rather than the entity spellings.
Before you use the result
- It decodes the common named entities and all numeric references. Rare named entities from the full HTML list are less likely to be recognised than numeric ones.
- It does not strip HTML tags; it only converts entities. Tags remain as text.
- Decoding text that was not actually encoded is harmless - it simply finds no entities to convert.
- A malformed entity, missing its semicolon, may be left as written rather than guessed at.
- This reverses encoding; it is not decryption.
Questions about HTML Entity Decoder
What forms of entity does it handle?
Named entities like & and <, decimal numeric references like ', and hexadecimal ones like '.
Does it remove HTML tags?
No. It only converts entities. Tags stay as text; stripping them is a different job.
Is it safe to run on plain text?
Yes. If there are no entities, nothing changes.
Why is one entity not decoded?
It may be a rare named entity or malformed - for instance missing its closing semicolon. Numeric references are the most reliable.
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