# HTML Entities Guide

Escape and unescape HTML special characters.

- Tool: https://ilham.dev/tools/html-entities/
- Guide URL: https://ilham.dev/guides/html-entities/
- Tool guides index: https://ilham.dev/guides/tools/
- Broader guide: Writing and Publishing Text for the Web (https://ilham.dev/guides/writing-for-the-web/)

## What it does

Escape and unescape HTML special characters, choosing between named entities and numeric ones, so text can be embedded safely in a page or a snippet read back to see what it really contains. It escapes what needs escaping rather than every non-ASCII character, which keeps the output readable.

## Use the tool

Open https://ilham.dev/tools/html-entities/, add the input the tool asks for, run it, and check the output before using it elsewhere.

## Input and output

- Input: text.
- Output: text.
- Category: Encoding.

## Privacy and processing
Processing happens locally in your browser. This tool does not upload the input to ilham.dev.

## Questions

### Which characters actually need escaping?

In HTML text content, & and <. Inside an attribute value, also the quote character you are using to delimit it. Escaping more than that is harmless but makes the source noisy.