XML Entities Encode/Decode

Unlike HTML, XML strictly requires escaping five special characters (&, <, >, ', "), or the document is considered invalid. This tool encodes and decodes those entities, as well as numeric character references.

How to use it

• Encode: paste text and the five reserved characters get replaced with their matching entities (&amp;, &lt;, &gt;, &apos;, &quot;).
• Decode: paste XML containing entities to get plain text back.
• Numeric character references (&#38; or &#x26;) are supported too, for characters outside the standard five.

Common uses

• Preparing user text for insertion into an XML document (an RSS feed, a SOAP request, a config file).
• Debugging why an XML parser rejects a document — often the cause is an unescaped ampersand or angle bracket inside the text.
• Decoding content received from an XML-based API to read it in its original form.

Things to keep in mind

XML parsers are much stricter than HTML: a single unescaped entity invalidates the entire document, not just one element.

CDATA sections (<![CDATA[...]]>) are an alternative to escaping for large blocks of text, letting you insert arbitrary content without replacing every special character individually.