HTML Escape / Unescape

How to Escape and Unescape HTML

1. Paste your text. Drop the text or markup you're working with into the top box.
2. Choose a direction. Click Escape to turn special characters into entities, or Unescape to turn entities back into plain characters.
3. Add optional characters. Tick the backtick or slash boxes to escape those too — useful when your output goes inside a template or script context.
4. Copy the result. The converted text appears below, ready to paste into your page or editor.

What This Tool Does

A handful of characters carry special meaning in HTML. Write a < in your content and the browser starts looking for a tag; write an & and it expects an entity. Escaping replaces those characters with safe stand-ins so they show up as literal text instead of being interpreted as markup. Unescaping does the reverse, turning entities back into readable characters.

Your text is processed entirely inside your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, so whatever you paste stays on your own device.

Why Escaping Matters

The everyday reason is display. If you're writing a tutorial and want to show someone what a <div> tag looks like, you have to escape it — otherwise the browser renders an actual div and your example vanishes from the page.

The more important reason is safety. When a site drops user-supplied text straight into a page without escaping it, anything that looks like a tag gets treated as one, and a comment field becomes a way to inject scripts into other people's browsers. That's the basis of cross-site scripting. Escaping on output is the standard defence: the text still displays exactly as written, but the browser reads it as content rather than code. This tool is handy for checking and preparing snippets by hand — inside an application, escaping should be handled by your framework or templating engine, which does it consistently on every value.

Frequently Asked Questions