Turn HTML entity codes back into the characters they stand for. Fast, free, and built for simple browser-based workflows.
&), decimal (&) and hex (&) forms are all supported.Paste text with HTML entities above, then click Decode Entities.
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HTML Entity Decoder is a free online tool that turns HTML entities back into the characters they stand for. Paste text where an ampersand, a quote or an accent arrived as a code, click Decode Entities, and the named, decimal and hexadecimal forms are all replaced with the real characters.
It is what you need when escaped text leaks out of the place it was escaped for: a product feed where every apostrophe reads as a code, a scraped page saved as plain text, an API response that encoded its own output twice, or a database column exported with the entities still sitting in it. Reading that by eye is slow and repairing it by hand is worse.
Everything runs inside your browser and nothing you paste is uploaded. Decoding happens in a detached textarea, which can only ever hold text, so markup in your input is read as characters and never executed -- worth knowing when the source is a scraped page you do not trust. The result stays on your device unless you copy or download it.
Drop the content into the Text Containing HTML Entities box. Named, decimal and hex codes can be mixed together freely.
Click Decode Entities. Every recognised code resolves at once and the line above the result says how many were changed.
Anything the browser does not recognise as an entity stays exactly as typed, so leftover codes point at a typo in the source rather than a failure here.
Click Copy for the clipboard, or Download to save the plain text as decoded-text.txt. Clear empties both boxes.
Yes! All our tools are 100% free to use with no hidden costs, no registration required, and no credit card needed.
Absolutely. All tools run entirely in your browser (client-side). Your data never leaves your device and is not sent to our servers.
Yes, once the page is loaded, the tool will continue to work even if you lose internet connection since it runs in your browser.
There is no strict character limit, but very large amounts of text (100,000+ characters) may slow down your browser.
Yes! All our tools are free for both personal and commercial use.
They are three spellings of the same thing. A named entity uses a word between an ampersand and a semicolon, a decimal one uses the character's code number, and a hex one writes that number in base 16. All three resolve to an identical character, and this tool reads all three.
No. The decoding happens inside a detached textarea element, which can only hold text -- a browser never parses tags or executes scripts inside one. Markup in your input comes back out as visible characters, which is why pasting a scraped or untrusted page here is safe.
Because it was encoded twice. The ampersand that began each entity had itself been escaped, so one pass reveals the entity instead of the character. Run the result through again and the real characters appear. Decoding twice automatically would corrupt text that legitimately mentions an entity.
Yes. Decoding uses the browser's own entity table, which covers the full HTML5 named set -- accented letters, dashes, arrows and mathematical symbols -- plus any numeric entity at all. An emoji written as a numeric code point comes back as the emoji itself.
No, this page only decodes. Use the HTML Entity Encoder for the other direction, which escapes ampersands, angle brackets and quotes so text can be shown on a page rather than parsed as markup. Keeping them separate means neither page is ambiguous about what it does.
Because a bare ampersand is not an entity. Decoding only touches a sequence that starts with an ampersand, ends with a semicolon and names a character the browser recognises. A stray ampersand in ordinary prose is left untouched, which is why the count can come back as zero.