HTML Escape

Content to be encoded

Content to be decoded

Why Escape Characters in HTML?
Certain characters have special meanings in HTML syntax. For instance, "<"denotes the start of an HTML tag, while "&" introduces character entities. To display these characters literally rather than as markup, they must be escaped to prevent browsers from interpreting them as code.

How Does HTML Escaping Work?
HTML escaping replaces special characters with character entities—standardized representations that browsers render as literal text rather than markup.
    • Character Entities: Entities consist of an ampersand (&), followed by either a named reference or numeric code, and terminated with a semicolon (;). For example, < represents "<" and& represents "&".

Common Characters Requiring Escaping
    • < (less than) → <
    • > (greater than) → >
    • & (ampersand) → &
    • " (double quote) → "
    • ' (single quote) → ' or '

Benefits of HTML Escaping
    • Correct Display: Ensures special characters render as intended rather than being interpreted as markup.
    • XSS Prevention: Proper escaping is critical for preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Escaping user-generated content prevents malicious scripts from executing in the browser.

Escaping Methods
    • Named Entities: Use predefined entity names like< and &. This approach is more readable and self-documenting.
    • Numeric References: Use decimal (<) or hexadecimal (<) codes to represent characters by their Unicode code points.