HTML Decoder: Convert Entities Back To Text

An HTML entity decoder reads references like &, <, ', © and   and replaces each one with the character it represents: an ampersand, a less-than sign, an apostrophe, a copyright symbol, a non-breaking space. The result is the text a browser would show if it rendered the markup - readable by people, searchable, and ready to paste into a document, a spreadsheet or a translation tool.

Who this is for

Encoded text turns up everywhere HTML has been stored or passed along. A CMS export where every title reads Tips & Tricks. A JSON API that returns descriptions with " in them. A page an AI assistant or a designer handed you where the visible text was escaped once too often, so the reader sees <p> instead of a paragraph. Paste it here to unescape the HTML and get the intended text back, then decide what to do with it.

How the decoder works

The tool hands your text to the HTML parser already built into your browser and reads back the text it produces. That parser knows every named entity the HTML standard defines, along with any decimal or hex reference, so nothing is looked up on a server and nothing is guessed. The parsed document is inert: scripts inside it never run, images never load, and it is discarded as soon as the text is read. Literal tags in your input are protected before parsing, so decoding only touches the entities - <p>Tips &amp; Tricks</p> becomes <p>Tips & Tricks</p>, tags intact. Everything happens in your browser; nothing is uploaded until you choose to publish.

Limits worth knowing

• Decoding is one level deep, exactly as a browser does it. Text that was encoded twice shows & after one pass; run it again to finish the job.
•   becomes a real non-breaking space, which looks like a space but will not wrap. Replace it with a normal space if the text is going somewhere that cares.
• This is not a URL decoder. Percent-encoded strings like %20 are left as they are.

From decoded text to a live page

If the decoded text is a page, publish it: one click puts it on a free HTTPS link with no account needed. The link lasts 30 minutes unless you claim it, and claiming is free. To see decoded markup rendered rather than as text, paste it into the HTML Viewer; to go the other way and escape text for a page, the HTML Encoder is the same tool with the tabs flipped. How publishing works covers what happens after you press the button.