HTML Entity Encoder

What are HTML Entities?

HTML entities are special character sequences that represent reserved or non-printable characters in HTML.

Format: &name; oder &#nummer;

Why does it matter?

• Security: Prevents XSS attacks
• Correct rendering: Shows < and > as text
• Special characters: © ® ™ € etc.
• Umlauts: ä ö ü without UTF-8

Tips

• Always escape <>&
• In attributes also escape "
• UTF-8 makes entity umlauts unnecessary
• Numeric entities are more universal

PHP Example

// Encode
htmlspecialchars($text);

// Decode
html_entity_decode($text);