Decoding HTML Entities
HTML entities appear when text has been encoded for safe embedding in HTML but then needs to be displayed as plain text. You'll encounter entity-encoded content in CMS exports, RSS feeds, email templates, database fields, and anywhere HTML content has been stored or transmitted as text.
Our decoder converts all standard HTML named entities (&, <, >, ", , ©, etc.) and numeric entities (©, ©) back to their original characters. It handles both decimal (&#NNN;) and hexadecimal (&#xNNN;) numeric references.
Common use cases: cleaning up text exported from WordPress, Drupal, or other CMSes that double-encode content, processing RSS feed descriptions that contain encoded HTML, normalizing content before storing in a database, and extracting readable text from HTML email content.
Tips
(non-breaking space) decodes to a space that looks like a space but isn't — watch for these in copy-pasted text.- Double-encoded entities like
&lt;decode to<, not<. Decode again to get the original character. - In JavaScript:
document.createElement("textarea").innerHTML = encoded; textarea.valuedecodes entities in the browser. - In Python:
html.unescape("<p>")handles all named and numeric entities.