Decode HTML entities to readable text. Fast, secure, and completely free. All processing happens in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
An HTML Entity Decoder converts named and numeric HTML entities — &, <, >, ", ', and hundreds of others like © or € — back into their literal characters, letting you read encoded text the way it was meant to be read rather than as raw markup source. This is the reverse operation of entity encoding, and it's what a browser does automatically when rendering a page; this tool lets you do the same conversion manually when you're inspecting raw HTML source rather than a rendered page.
Reading raw HTML source — from a CMS export, an RSS feed, or a page's 'view source' — often means wading through entity-encoded text where every apostrophe is ' and every ampersand is &. Decoding it turns that into plain, readable text, which is genuinely useful when you're extracting content from HTML for use elsewhere, debugging why a page displays a literal & instead of the ampersand it was supposed to render, or verifying that content copied out of a rich text editor didn't get double-encoded along the way.
That's usually a sign of double-encoding — the text was entity-encoded twice, so decoding it once still leaves visible entity syntax. Decode it again to fully resolve it to a plain apostrophe or ampersand.
No, this tool is specifically for HTML entities. CSS and JavaScript have their own separate escaping syntax that requires different tools.
Yes, both decimal (😀) and hexadecimal (😀) numeric character references are decoded correctly, including characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane like most emoji.
It passes through unchanged — the decoder only converts recognized entity patterns and leaves plain text exactly as it was.
No — decoded plain text should be re-encoded before being inserted into HTML again if it might contain special characters, otherwise you risk reintroducing markup injection issues.