Numeric HTML entities — text to é or é and back

How to use the numeric HTML entities tool

1. Set Direction to Encode or Decode.
2. Paste your text into Input.
3. When encoding, choose the Format: Decimal é or Hex é.
4. Choose the Characters to convert: Every character, or Non-ASCII and & < > " ' to leave plain letters, digits and spaces readable.
5. Copy the Encoded or Decoded result.

What it does and when to use it

A numeric character reference writes one character as &# plus its code point and a semicolon. Browsers and XML parsers turn it back into the character. This is useful when:

• A CMS, email template or legacy system breaks accented letters or emoji, but passes plain ASCII safely.
• You need a symbol in HTML that has no named entity, such as ✓ or a rare script character.
• You are writing test cases for an HTML or XML parser.
• You want to see which code points a piece of text really contains.

Decoding helps you read text from feeds, exports or databases that were saved with references. For named entities like é and —, use the HTML encoder and HTML decoder. For XML-only escaping, see the XML encoder, and for a reference list of entities, the HTML entities reference.

How it works

Encoding goes through the text one code point at a time, so an emoji counts as one character. Each selected character is written as &# + decimal code + ; or &#x + upper-case hex code + ;. With the special-characters option, ASCII letters, digits, spaces and punctuation stay as they are, except &, <, >, " and ', which are always converted.

Decoding finds every &#NNN; and &#xHHH; reference and replaces it with its character. References above U+10FFFF or in the surrogate range U+D800–U+DFFF are invalid, so they are left as written. It all runs in your browser.

Worked examples

é😀                      (special only)  →  é😀
Hi                       (hex, every)    →  Hi
Café ✓ 😀 <tag>          (special only)  →  Caf&#233; &#10003; &#128512; &#60;tag&#62;
Caf&#233; &#x1F600;      (Decode)        →  Café 😀

The third line shows the usual setting for web pages: the markup characters < and > and the non-ASCII characters are converted, the rest stays readable. With Every character, the same input becomes 15 references, even for the spaces.

Limits and tips

• Numeric references are not a security filter. To show user text safely in HTML, escaping &, <, > and quotes is what matters.
• References must end with a semicolon to be decoded here. &#233 without the semicolon is left as written.
• Line breaks are converted too when you choose Every character, which can make the output one long line.