How to Escape HTML Online

Escape and unescape HTML entities instantly. Convert special characters like <, >, &, and quotes to their HTML entity equivalents. Free online tool for safe HTML handling.

Open HTML Entity Encoder →

Step-by-Step Guide

1

Paste your HTML or text

Enter the text containing special characters you want to escape, or paste already-escaped HTML entities you want to decode back to readable text. The tool handles any length of input.

2

Choose escape or unescape

Select "Escape" to convert characters like <, >, &, double quotes, and single quotes into their HTML entity equivalents (<, >, &, etc.). Select "Unescape" to convert entities back to their original characters.

3

Review the output

The converted text appears instantly. Escaped output is safe to embed in HTML documents without breaking the markup. All standard HTML entities and numeric character references are supported.

4

Copy and use

Click the copy button to grab your escaped or unescaped text. Use escaped text when displaying user-generated content in HTML, writing code examples in documentation, or embedding snippets in blog posts.

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Open HTML Entity Encoder

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I need to escape HTML?
Escaping HTML prevents XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks and ensures special characters display correctly in web pages. Without escaping, characters like < and > would be interpreted as HTML tags instead of displayed as text.
Which characters need to be escaped?
The five critical characters are: & (ampersand), < (less than), > (greater than), double quote, and single quote (apostrophe). These are the characters that have special meaning in HTML syntax.
Is HTML escaping the same as URL encoding?
No. HTML escaping converts characters to HTML entities (<) for safe display in web pages. URL encoding converts characters to percent-encoded format (%3C) for safe use in URLs. They serve different purposes.
Related Reference

HTML Cheat Sheet

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