Explainer1 min readUpdated June 29, 2026

What are HTML entities?

Q: What is the difference between & and &?

& is the literal ampersand character, which HTML treats as the start of an entity. & is the entity that safely displays an ampersand as text.

Q: Do I need entities for accented letters?

Usually not. If your page uses UTF-8, you can write characters like é directly. Entities are mainly needed for the reserved characters & and for clarity with invisible characters.

Short answer

An HTML entity is a code that stands in for a character, written as an ampersand, a name or number, and a semicolon. They let you show characters that have special meaning in HTML, such as < and &, or symbols that are hard to type.

Why entities exist

Some characters are part of HTML's own syntax. A < starts a tag and an & starts an entity, so writing them literally as text can confuse the browser. Entities encode them safely so they display as characters instead of being parsed as markup.

<   ->  &lt;
>   ->  &gt;
&   ->  &amp;
"   ->  &quot;
'   ->  &#39;

The characters you must escape in text

Named and numeric forms

Entities come in two forms: named, like © for ©, and numeric, like © or © using the character's code point. Numeric entities can represent any character, even when no named version exists.

Escaping prevents injectionEscaping user-provided text into entities before placing it in a page is a core defense against cross-site scripting. Never insert untrusted input as raw HTML.

Try it: HTML EntitiesEncode text into HTML entities or decode entities back to characters locally.Open tool

References

Questions

What is the difference between & and &?

& is the literal ampersand character, which HTML treats as the start of an entity. & is the entity that safely displays an ampersand as text.

Do I need entities for accented letters?

Usually not. If your page uses UTF-8, you can write characters like é directly. Entities are mainly needed for the reserved characters < > & and for clarity with invisible characters.

Does this send my data anywhere?

No. Utilumo's developer tools parse and transform input inside the browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged.