HTML Escape Unescape
Encode or decode HTML special characters.
How to use
- 1 Choose Escape to encode text, or Unescape to decode entities.
- 2 Paste your text or HTML into the input box.
- 3 Read the converted result in the output panel.
- 4 Copy the output to use it elsewhere.
About HTML Escape Unescape
HTML Escape Unescape converts text to and from HTML entity form so that markup-significant characters display literally instead of being interpreted by the browser.
When you escape, the five reserved characters — the ampersand, less-than, greater-than, double quote and single quote — are replaced with their named entities (&, <, >, " and '), which is exactly what you need before dropping user-supplied text into an HTML page, an attribute value or a template.
The unescape direction reverses the process.
It decodes the standard named entities and also handles numeric character references in both decimal (A) and hexadecimal (A) form, so you can paste in an escaped snippet copied from page source, a log file or an API response and read it as plain text again.
Unknown or malformed entities are left untouched rather than mangled, so nothing is silently lost.
Everything runs in your browser with no network calls, which means your code and content never leave your machine and the tool keeps working offline.
It is handy for web developers sanitising output, writers embedding code examples that contain angle brackets, and anyone debugging why a page is rendering tags instead of showing them.
FAQ
Which characters get escaped?
The five HTML-significant characters: & < > " and '. The ampersand is escaped first so existing entities are not double-encoded.
Does unescape handle numeric references?
Yes. It decodes named entities plus decimal (A) and hexadecimal (A) character references. Unknown entities are left as-is.