HTML Encode
Easily convert text into safe HTML entities.
Text Input
Encoded HTML Output
Why Use This Tool? ✅
Fast & Accurate
Correctly encodes special characters into their HTML entity equivalents.
Prevents Errors
Ensures that special characters like < and > are displayed as text, not parsed as HTML tags.
Enhances Security
A crucial step for sanitizing user input to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
User-Friendly Interface
A simple, clean two-panel layout makes encoding text for the web effortless.
Why We Escape: A Guide to HTML Encoding 🔡
HTML encoding (or "escaping") is the process of converting characters that have a special meaning in HTML into their "entity" equivalents. This ensures that the browser displays these characters as literal text, rather than interpreting them as part of the HTML code.
The Reserved Characters
There are five key characters that must be encoded to be displayed correctly and safely:
<becomes<(Less-Than)>becomes>(Greater-Than)&becomes&(Ampersand)"becomes"(Double Quote)'becomes'or'(Single Quote)
If you tried to write directly in your HTML to show it as text, the browser would try to render it as a paragraph tag. By encoding it to <p>, you tell the browser, "Show these characters literally."
A Critical Security Practice: Sanitizing User Input
Perhaps the most important reason for HTML encoding is security. Imagine a website with a comments section. If a malicious user submits a comment containing and the website displays it without encoding, that script could run in the browser of every other user who views the page. This is a common attack called Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
By properly encoding the user's input, the malicious script becomes <script>malicious_code.js</script>. The browser will now simply display this as harmless text on the page instead of executing it. This tool provides a simple way for developers to test and perform this vital sanitization step.