About the HTML Unescape
Scraped text, API responses and database dumps often carry HTML entities: & for an ampersand, ' for an apostrophe, for a non-breaking space, € for the euro sign. This tool decodes them using the browser's own HTML parser, so every one of the two thousand-plus named entities in the HTML standard is recognised, along with decimal and hexadecimal numeric references.
Only entities are touched; tags in the text are left as they are, so the tool is safe to run on escaped HTML source that you want to read. If the text was escaped twice, run it again.
For text that needs its tags removed as well, use HTML to Text. For XML, which knows only five named entities, the XML Unescape tool is stricter.
How to use
- Paste the text containing entities.
- Copy the decoded text.
- Run it again if entities remain (double-escaped input).
Common questions
- Which entities are supported?
- All named entities defined in the HTML standard, plus numeric references in decimal (©) and hex (©) form.
- Does it remove tags?
- No. Tags stay in the text. Use HTML to Text if you want them removed.
- Why is decoded to a normal-looking space?
- It becomes the non-breaking space character U+00A0, which looks like a space but prevents line wrapping. Paste it into the Invisible Characters tool to see it.