HTML Entity Decoder

How HTML Decoding Works

HTML decoding reverses the entity-encoding process defined in the HTML Living Standard. When a browser or server encodes special characters for safe embedding in HTML markup, it replaces them with entity references. Decoding converts those references back to their original characters.

Entity Types

There are three types of HTML entities. Named entities use a human-readable keyword: & for &, < for <, © for the copyright symbol. Decimal numeric entities use the Unicode code point in base-10: © for the copyright symbol. Hexadecimal numeric entities use the code point in base-16: © for the same character. HTML5 defines 2,231 named character references covering Latin, Greek, mathematical, and symbol characters.

The Decoding Algorithm

This tool uses the browser's native HTML parser via a temporary DOM element. When HTML content is assigned to an element's innerHTML, the browser automatically resolves all entity references to their character values. Reading the element's textContent then returns the decoded plain text. This approach handles every entity defined in the HTML specification, including multi-byte UTF-8 sequences and supplementary Unicode planes.

When to Use HTML Decoding

Common use cases include extracting readable text from API responses that return HTML-encoded data, processing web-scraped content for text analysis, converting HTML email content to plain text, and debugging encoded strings in log files. Always keep data HTML-encoded when inserting into HTML documents to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.