What is the difference between decimal and hex entities?

Both reference the same Unicode code point. A decimal entity writes the number in base 10, like for a non-breaking space, while a hex entity writes it in base 16, like . Browsers treat the two forms identically.

Does this handle characters above U+FFFF?

Yes. Emoji and other astral-plane characters have a single code point above 65535, and the tool emits one numeric entity for the whole code point rather than splitting it into surrogate halves, which keeps the output correct and compact.

Can I encode only special characters?

By default every character is converted so the output is fully ASCII-safe, which is useful for email and legacy systems. The named-entity tool is a better fit when you only want to escape markup-critical characters and keep text readable.

Will it decode named entities too?

Decoding expands numeric decimal and hex references plus the five core named entities amp, lt, gt, quot, and apos, so mixed input round-trips cleanly. For the full named-entity table, use the dedicated named-entity decoder.

Why use numeric entities at all?

They guarantee a character displays correctly even when the page encoding is uncertain or limited to ASCII. They are common in XML, email templates, and exported data where a reliable, encoding-independent representation is needed.

HTML Numeric Entity Encoder/Decoder

Numeric HTML entities reference characters by their Unicode code point rather than by name, so any character at all can be written in pure ASCII. This tool encodes text to decimal or hexadecimal numeric references and decodes them back.

How it works

Encoding reads each Unicode code point of the input and emits it as a numeric reference in the base you choose:

decimal:  char -> &#<codePoint>;     "A" -> &#65;    " " -> &#160;
hex:      char -> &#x<HEXcodePoint>; "A" -> &#x41;   " " -> &#xA0;

Because it works on full code points (via the string iterator), characters above U+FFFF such as emoji become one entity, not a broken surrogate pair. Decoding parses &#NN; and &#xNN;, converts the number to a code point, and rebuilds the original character with String.fromCodePoint.

Example and notes

The word café encoded as decimal becomes café, and the non-breaking space U+00A0 becomes   in hex. If you only need to make markup safe to display while keeping text human-readable, the named-entity tool is usually a better choice; numeric encoding shines when you need a fully ASCII-safe, encoding-independent representation.