Why escape HTML?
The characters <, >, &, " and ' have special meaning in HTML. If you want to show code on a web page, or insert user input into a page, you must escape them. Otherwise the browser treats them as markup, which can break the layout or open a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole.
Named vs numeric entities
Named entities such as © are easy to read, while numeric ones such as © or © work for any Unicode character. The decoder understands named, decimal and hex entities. Modern pages served as UTF-8 don't need £ or é encoded, but the "encode every non-ASCII" option helps with old systems and email templates.
Frequently asked questions
What does & mean?
It is the escaped form of the ampersand (&).
Is escaping enough to stop XSS?
It is the main defence for text inside HTML, but attributes, URLs and scripts need context-specific escaping too.
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