About HTML Entity Decode

Convert HTML entities back to characters. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Text / String collection.

Use Cases

• Extracting readable text from web scraping results
• Cleaning over-encoded content migrated between CMS platforms
• Converting HTML email source back to editable plain text
• Processing RSS feed content that contains encoded entities

Tips

• Decode entities from scraped web content to get plain text
• Handle both named entities and numeric references automatically
• Use this to clean CMS content that was over-escaped on export

Fun Facts

• The   (non-breaking space) entity is the most misused HTML entity, often used for spacing instead of CSS margins.
• Numeric character references like — can represent any Unicode character, enabling all 149,813 assigned code points.
• The HTML5 parser defines special handling for 'ambiguous ampersands' to maintain backward compatibility with malformed pages.

FAQ

What's the difference between named and numeric entities?

Both represent the same character. Named (&, <) are readable; numeric (&, &) are universal — every parser supports numeric, not all support less-common named ones.

Does it handle all HTML5 named entities?

Yes — the full HTML5 entity set including less-common ones like ⨯ and „. Obsolete HTML4-only entities are also recognized.

What about entities inside attributes?

Yes. Attribute values often contain & or " that need decoding — the tool handles both element content and attribute context.

Will it decode already-decoded text?

Idempotent by default — text without entity sequences passes through unchanged. No double-decoding bugs.