How to Escape and Unescape HTML Entities
Published September 11, 2026 · 2 min read
Characters like <, >, & and quotes have special meaning in HTML, so displaying them literally on a web page means converting them to their entity equivalents first — otherwise a browser tries to interpret them as markup. This tool converts in both directions.
Try HTML EntitiesSteps
- 1
Open the HTML Entities tool
Go to the HTML entity converter.
- 2
Enter your text
Type or paste text containing special characters.
- 3
Choose escape or unescape
Pick the direction you need.
- 4
Copy the result
Paste it directly into your HTML source.
Frequently asked questions
Without escaping, a browser interprets characters like < and > as the start of HTML tags, which can break your page's rendering or, worse, open the door to injection issues.
Yes — unescape mode converts entities like & and < back to their literal characters.
The most common and necessary entities for safe display — angle brackets, ampersands and quotes — are handled, covering the characters that actually need escaping for safe HTML output.
Because this runs locally, you can safely prepare user-generated or copied text for embedding in HTML without any of it passing through a third party.