HTML Entity Decoder
Decode HTML entities back to plain text instantly online. Supports all named entities (&, <, >), numeric (&#39;), and hex (&#x27;) references. Free — runs in your browser.
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HTML entity decoding converts entity references back to their original characters: & → &, < → <, © → ©, A → A, and A → A. There are over 2,000 named HTML5 entities covering Latin characters, Greek symbols, mathematical operators, arrows, typographic punctuation, and emoji. Numeric entities (decimal and hexadecimal) cover the full Unicode range.
HTML-encoded text appears in API responses from content management systems, RSS feed item bodies, scraping output from HTML parsers that preserve entity references, HTML email content, and data exported from WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE or CKEditor. When this text is processed as plain text (stored in a database, compared, or displayed in a non-HTML context), the entities must be decoded first.
This tool decodes all named HTML5 entities, decimal numeric references ( ), and hexadecimal numeric references ( ). Decoding is performed via the browser's own HTML parser: the input is assigned to a temporary element's innerHTML, and .textContent is read back — guaranteeing correct decoding of every entity the browser supports.
Common Use Cases
Cleaning RSS feed content for plain-text processing
RSS 2.0 feed item descriptions are HTML fragments with entities like &, <, and " preserved by the feed generator. A news aggregation pipeline that extracts article summaries for full-text search indexing must decode these entities before indexing, otherwise the search index contains literal & strings that will never match user queries.
Normalizing CMS API response text
WordPress's REST API returns post titles and content with HTML entities preserved (e.g., AT&T for 'AT&T', – for an en dash). When consuming these responses in a mobile app or email newsletter template that renders plain text rather than HTML, decoding entities here produces the clean text string the renderer expects.
Fixing double-encoded content in databases
Legacy systems that ran user input through HTML encoding before storing it in a database, and then encoded it again on output, produce strings like &amp;lt;. Identifying the degree of encoding and decoding iteratively here clarifies how many decode passes the data migration script must apply to recover the original unencoded text.
Extracting plain text from scraped HTML
Web scrapers using Cheerio, BeautifulSoup, or Puppeteer sometimes return text nodes with HTML entities still intact, especially from server-rendered pages with improper encoding handling. Decoding the scraped text here converts to spaces, — to em dashes, and named entities to their proper Unicode characters before storing in a database.
About HTML Entity Decoding
- Converts named entities like
&,<,>,"back to their characters - Handles numeric entities:
'and'(decimal and hex) - Supports all standard HTML5 named character references
- Uses the browser's native HTML parser — no external library needed
Common use cases
- Reading HTML-escaped API responses or database values
- Cleaning up copy-pasted content from HTML sources
- Reverse-encoding content that was encoded for display