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About HTML Entity Decoder Online
This tool converts HTML entities back to their original characters. < becomes <, & becomes &, é becomes é, ☃ becomes ☃, and any other named or numeric entity is resolved to its Unicode character.
Useful when you encounter HTML-encoded text in copied content, in API responses that return escaped HTML, or in log files where user input has been sanitised. Decoding makes the original content readable again.
The tool supports all named entities defined in the HTML5 specification (over 2,200 named entities), as well as decimal and hexadecimal numeric entities like A and A (both decode to A).
How to use this tool
How to decode HTML entities back to plain characters
Paste the HTML-encoded text
Drop the entity-encoded string into the "Text" field. Both named entities (`&`, `<`, `©`) and numeric entities (`'`, `'`) are recognised.
Press Run
Result returns a single `decoded` field. Examples: `<p>Hi&ya</p>` → `<p>Hi&ya</p>`; `café` → `café`. Unknown entities (typos, made-up ones) pass through unchanged.
Common upstream sources
RSS feeds, email-body HTML, scraped page text, and JSON exports that double-escape are typical inputs. After decoding, the result is plain Unicode — not HTML — so don't re-embed it in HTML without re-encoding via `html-entity-encoder` first.
Decode once, not twice
Don't pipe the output back into the decoder thinking it might still have hidden entities. If a string was double-encoded upstream you'll need to decode twice, but only after confirming with a sample — blindly double-decoding mangles legitimate `&` characters.