About Us

EscapeHTML is a one-tool site. We build an HTML entity encoder and decoder — escapes text into HTML entities to prevent cross-site scripting and decodes entities back to plain text, with named, decimal and hex styles — and nothing else. No sign-up, no mailing list, no paywall: you open the page and use it.

The idea behind EscapeHTML

Plenty of developer pages already exist. Most of them make you dismiss a banner, ignore a modal and scroll past filler before the tool appears. EscapeHTML inverts that: the tool is the page, it escapes text into HTML entities to prevent cross-site scripting and decodes entities back to plain text, with named, decimal and hex styles, and everything else is explanation you can read or skip.

How the calculation works

No server is involved in the arithmetic. It escapes the five characters that change meaning in HTML — ampersand, angle brackets and both quote styles — and because decoding is single-pass, an escaped sequence like A resolves back to the literal text A rather than to A, which is exactly the behavior that keeps a second decode from turning sanitized input back into live markup. We state the method openly because a tool that cannot explain its own answer is not much use to anyone trying to trust it.

Where your data goes

The text or entity string you paste never leaves your browser. There is no backend that receives it, no database that stores it, and no advertiser that sees it — so you can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and the tool keeps working.

Who tends to use it

• programmers tidying up a payload or a schema.
• engineers debugging something at short notice.
• anyone who would rather not paste a token into a server.

Keeping the lights on

EscapeHTML costs nothing to use, and the hosting is paid for by advertising. That advertising is kept separate from the calculation: it cannot see what you type and it has no influence on the result.

Tell us what you think

If something is wrong, or if there is a feature you would find useful, the contact page is the way to reach us. Messages from people who use the HTML entity encoder and decoder shape what gets built next.