HTML Entity Encoder & Decoder

HTML entities represent special characters using a named or numeric code — &amp; for &, &lt; for <, &gt; for >, &quot; for ", and &#39; for '. You must use entities when displaying characters that have special meaning in HTML. The < and > characters would be interpreted as HTML tags, & starts an entity reference, and quotes can break attribute values. Entities are also used for characters not available on your keyboard, like &copy; (©), &mdash; (—), &euro; (€), and Unicode symbols. DevBolt's encoder handles both named entities and numeric codes.

HTML encoding converts characters to HTML entities for safe display in web pages. A less-than sign becomes &lt; so browsers render it as text instead of interpreting it as a tag. URL encoding (percent-encoding) converts characters to percent-hex codes for safe transmission in URLs. A space becomes %20 so it is not misread as a URL delimiter. HTML encoding protects against XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks in page content. URL encoding ensures data passes through URL parsing correctly. They serve different purposes and are not interchangeable — use HTML encoding in HTML content and URL encoding in URLs.

Always HTML-encode user-provided content before inserting it into HTML pages. This converts < to &lt;, > to &gt;, & to &amp;, " to &quot;, and ' to &#39;, preventing injected scripts from executing. In React, JSX automatically escapes values in curly braces. In server-rendered HTML, use your framework's built-in escaping (htmlspecialchars in PHP, html.escape in Python, ERB's h helper in Rails). Never use innerHTML or dangerouslySetInnerHTML with unsanitized user input. For rich text, use a sanitization library like DOMPurify that allows safe HTML tags while stripping dangerous elements.