HTML Entities

How HTML Entities works

Convert <, >, & and quotes into HTML entities, or decode an entity-laden string back to plain text. Everything happens inside this page: the tool reads your input, runs the calculation or conversion locally, and hands the result back to you. Nothing is transmitted, because there is no backend to transmit it to.

That design choice is deliberate. Most free tool sites upload your files to a server, process them there, and quietly keep a copy. Toolcin cannot do that — the site is a set of static files. If your connection dropped the moment the page finished loading, every tool would still work.

Why &amp; exists

In HTML the ampersand starts an entity, the less-than sign starts a tag and the greater-than sign ends one. To display those characters literally you must encode them: &amp; &lt; &gt;. Everything else — quotes, spaces, accented letters — has an entity too, though most are optional in UTF-8.

Encoding is therefore not cosmetic: an unescaped & in a URL can break the link, and an unescaped < can swallow the rest of the paragraph.

Named, decimal and hex

&amp; is a named entity, &#38; is decimal and &#x26; is hexadecimal — three ways to write the same character. Named entities are readable; numeric ones work for characters that have no name.

Decoding accepts all three forms, which is what makes it useful for cleaning text pasted out of a CMS.

The classic double-encoding bug

Encoding text that is already encoded turns &amp; into &amp;amp;, which then displays literally. If a page shows “&amp;” to the reader, something encoded twice — decode once and inspect.

Good to know

• Works offline once loaded, including on flights and in locked-down networks.
• No file size limit beyond your device's own memory.
• Free to use, with no account and no usage counter.
• Results are produced locally, so they are not logged or shared with anyone.

Questions