HTML Entity Identifier
Certain characters cannot appear literally in HTML because the browser would read them as markup. An angle bracket starts a tag and an ampersand starts an entity, so displaying them as text requires escaping them as < and &. Skipping that step produces broken layouts at best and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities at worst.
Entities also cover characters that are awkward to type or easy to lose in a copy and paste: the non-breaking space that keeps a number attached to its unit, typographic quotes, em dashes, arrows, currency symbols and mathematical operators. Referring to them by name makes source code readable to the next person who edits it.
This tool identifies entities and converts between characters and their escaped forms, which is useful when reviewing content pasted from a word processor, debugging output that renders as literal &amp; on the page, or preparing a code sample for publication. It runs locally, so nothing you paste is transmitted.
How to use the HTML Entity Identifier
- Paste the text or HTML fragment you want to inspect.
- Choose whether to escape characters into entities or convert entities back to characters.
- Review the output for any characters you did not expect.
- Fix double-escaped sequences, which show as &amp; on the rendered page.
- Copy the corrected text into your template or CMS.
Examples
- A developer escapes a code sample so that tags display as text instead of rendering.
- An editor cleans smart quotes and dashes pasted from a word processor into a CMS field.
- A support engineer diagnoses a page showing literal &amp; caused by double escaping.
Frequently asked questions
Which characters must always be escaped?
The ampersand, the less-than sign and the greater-than sign in body text, plus quotation marks inside attribute values.
What is &nbsp; for?
A non-breaking space prevents a line break at that point, useful for keeping a figure with its unit or a name with its title.
Why does my page show &amp; instead of &?
The content was escaped twice. Decode once and ensure your template escapes output only at the final rendering step.
Do I still need entities with UTF-8?
For most symbols, no; the literal character works. The markup-significant characters must still be escaped.
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