About the HTML Entity Decoder
This decoder turns HTML entities — both named ones like & and numeric ones like é or é — back into their plain-text characters. It uses a built-in lookup table and safe string parsing rather than rendering markup in the DOM.
How to use it
- 01Paste text containing HTML entities.
- 02Read the decoded plain text on the right.
- 03Copy the result for use elsewhere.
Features
- Around 80 common named entities recognized (accents, punctuation, symbols, arrows, Greek letters)
- Decimal (é) and hexadecimal (é) numeric entities supported
- No use of innerHTML or the DOM parser, so no markup is ever executed
Practical examples
Cleaning scraped text
Convert entity-laden text copied from a webpage back into normal readable characters.
Inspecting CMS content
Decode entities stored in a content field to see the actual text a user typed.
Limitations
- Named entities outside the built-in list of roughly 80 common ones are left unchanged.
- This tool decodes entities only; it does not strip or parse surrounding HTML tags.
Privacy
Decoding is done with plain string parsing in your browser — no HTML is ever rendered or sent anywhere.
Read the full privacy policy for how the site as a whole handles data.
Frequently asked questions
Does this use innerHTML to decode entities?
No. It uses a regular expression and a lookup table, so no markup is ever parsed or executed, which avoids injection risks entirely.
What if an entity isn't recognized?
Unrecognized named entities are left as-is in the output rather than guessed at.
Are numeric entities supported?
Yes, both decimal (é) and hexadecimal (é) forms are converted using their Unicode code point.