HTML Entity Decoder
Decode HTML entities back to readable characters instantly. Convert < > & and all entities to plain text. Free, no signup needed.
Convert HTML Entities Back to Readable Characters
HTML entity references—`<`, `>`, `&`, ` `, `©`, numeric references like `©` and `©`—appear throughout web-sourced content, API responses, database exports, and copied HTML. While these encoded forms are correct HTML, they make the underlying text difficult to read and edit as plain text. Our free HTML entity decoder converts all standard HTML entity references back to their corresponding characters, producing clean, readable output.
Paste your entity-encoded text, click Decode, and the result replaces every entity reference with the character it represents. The decoder handles all named HTML5 entities (the full standard list of over 2,000 named references), decimal numeric references (`&#number;`), and hexadecimal numeric references (`&#xHex;`).
When HTML Entities Appear in Content You Need to Process
Web Scraping and Content Extraction
When you scrape or extract text content from web pages, the raw HTML source contains entity-encoded characters rather than the display characters the browser renders. A headline reading "AT&T acquires..." appears in the source as `AT&T acquires...`. An article discussing `5 < 10 > 3` contains `5 < 10 > 3` in the HTML. To work with the actual text content, decoding the entities is a necessary preprocessing step before analysis, storage, or display in a different context.
Email Content Processing
HTML emails encode special characters as HTML entities to ensure correct rendering across email clients. When you extract text content from email HTML—for analysis, classification, CRM import, or display in a custom interface—the entity-encoded content needs to be decoded to produce readable text. The non-breaking space (` `) is particularly common in HTML email formatting and often needs to be converted to regular spaces before text processing.
CMS and Platform Exports
Content exported from WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many other CMS platforms may encode certain characters as HTML entities in the export, particularly in older export formats or when content was originally stored with entity encoding. Database dumps from web applications often contain entity-encoded text in content fields. Decoding these before import into a new system or for content analysis produces clean text.
API Response Content
REST APIs that return content scraped or aggregated from web sources often include HTML entity references in the text fields, particularly in news APIs, content aggregation services, and social media APIs that include description or snippet fields derived from web content. Decoding these entities transforms the API's text content into display-ready plain text.
Named Entities, Decimal, and Hexadecimal: All Handled
HTML provides three syntactic forms for entity references, and all three represent the same underlying character. Named entities use a descriptive identifier: `©` for ©, `—` for —, `€` for €. Decimal numeric references use the character's Unicode code point as a decimal number: `©` for ©, `—` for —, `€` for €. Hexadecimal numeric references use the code point in hex: `©` for ©, `—` for —, `€` for €.
Our decoder handles all three forms with equal reliability. Mixed content—text containing both named entities and numeric entities—decodes correctly in a single pass. The only characters that remain unchanged are those that don't need decoding: regular text characters that were never encoded.
Double-Encoded Entities
Occasionally content goes through multiple rounds of HTML encoding, producing double-encoded entities like `&lt;` (which represents the literal text `<` rather than the less-than character `<`). This happens when HTML content is encoded by one system and then the encoded output is encoded again by another system.
Decoding double-encoded content requires two passes through the decoder: the first pass converts `&lt;` to `<`, the second pass converts `<` to `<`. If your decoded output still contains entity references rather than the expected characters, apply the decoder a second time to handle double encoding.
Free, Private, and Instant
The HTML entity decoder runs entirely in your browser. No encoded text you paste in is transmitted to any server or stored anywhere. The tool is completely free with no account required and works on any device with a modern browser.