HTML entities are codes that represent characters with special meaning in HTML markup. This tool decodes both named entities (like &, <, ©) and numeric entities (like A or A) back to their original characters using the browser's own parsing engine.
&, <, or numeric references like ©.  and   forms.HTML-encoded text replaces characters with entity references that browsers render as the original characters. When you need the raw text — for search indexing, content migration, or natural language processing — you must decode those entities back to their character equivalents. This decoder handles all named HTML entities (over 2,000 from the HTML5 spec), decimal numeric references, and hexadecimal references.
Named entities: & = &, < = <, > = >, = non-breaking space, © = ©. Decimal numeric references: © = ©, € = €. Hexadecimal references: © = ©. All three forms are equivalent — web pages may mix them freely. HTML5 defines over 2,000 named entity references beyond the original HTML 4 set.
©) and hexadecimal (©) numeric references (non-breaking space, U+00A0) looks like a space but prevents line breaks between the characters on either side. Browsers treat it as a different character. Use the "normalise spaces" option to convert them to regular spaces.
Zero-width space (U+200B) is used to hint word-wrap positions in long strings without a natural break point (like a long URL). It is invisible but present in the text. The decoder shows it explicitly so you know it is there.
Yes — the decoder is format-agnostic. If a JavaScript string or JSON value contains HTML entity strings, paste it here and decode it. The result is the character the entity represents.
' is the apostrophe entity from XML — it was not part of the original HTML 4 spec but is valid in HTML5. ' is the numeric decimal reference. Both decode to a single quote character (U+0027).
See also the HTML Encoder, HTML Entity Encoder, and the HTML Formatter.