HTML Entity Decoder

The decoder recognises a fixed list and nothing else:

That covers text escaped for safe display, which is the common case when you copy from page source, a JSON API or a database export:

Note that   turns into a normal space (character code 32), not a non-breaking one. Lines that relied on it to stay together can wrap after decoding.

Every other entity passes through unchanged, and matching is case-sensitive:

The same goes for most numeric references, curly quotes such as ’, currency symbols and accented letters like é. Two cases come up often. The zero-padded ', which some server-side escaping functions write for an apostrophe, is not decoded, and neither is the hex form '. If your text still shows entities after decoding, replace those by hand.

Text that was encoded twice, such as <, is common when data passes through two systems that both escape it. This decoder handles & first and then the rest, so one pass decodes both layers:

That is handy for fixing doubly escaped text. The catch is that you can't recover text that was meant to show an entity literally. A tutorial line explaining <, stored as <, comes out as a bare < rather than the four characters of the entity.

Decoding turns escaped text back into live markup. If the input was escaped user content, the output can contain working <script> tags or event attributes. Read it first, and don't insert decoded text into a page's HTML unless you trust where it came from.