### Roll Your Own <sup>(caveat - use HE instead for most use cases)</sup>

For pure JS without a lib, you can [Encode and Decode HTML entities using pure Javascript][1] like this:

```js
let encode = str => {
  let buf = [];

  for (var i = str.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
    buf.unshift(['&#', str[i].charCodeAt(), ';'].join(''));
  }

  return buf.join('');
}

let decode = str => {
  return str.replace(/&#(\d+);/g, function(match, dec) {
    return String.fromCharCode(dec);
  });
}
```

**Usages**:

```js
encode("Hello > © <") // "&#72;&#101;&#108;&#108;&#111;&#32;&#62;&#32;&#169;&#32;&#60;"
decode("Hello &gt; &copy; &#169; &lt;") // "Hello &gt; &copy; © &lt;"
```

**However**, you can see this approach has a couple shortcomings:

* It encodes even safe characters `H` → `&#72;`
* It can decode numeric codes (not in the astral plane), but doesn't know anything about [full list of html entities / named character codes supported by browsers][2] like `&gt;`

---

## Use the [HE Library][8] (Html Entities)



* Support for [**all standardized named character references**][9]
* Support for [**unicode**][10]
* Works with [**ambiguous ampersands**][11]
* Written by [**Mathias Bynens**][12]

**Usage**:

```js
he.encode('foo © bar ≠ baz 𝌆 qux'); 
// Output : 'foo &#xA9; bar &#x2260; baz &#x1D306; qux'

he.decode('foo &copy; bar &ne; baz &#x1D306; qux');
// Output : 'foo © bar ≠ baz 𝌆 qux'
```

### Related Questions

* [How to convert characters to HTML entities using plain JavaScript][3]
* [Encode html entities in javascript][4]
* [Unescape HTML entities in Javascript?][5]
* [HTML Entity Decode][6]
* [What's the right way to decode a string that has special HTML entities in it?][7]
* [Strip HTML from Text JavaScript][13]

[1]: https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/188/encode-and-decode-html-entities-using-pure-javascript
[2]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/named-characters.html
[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23831239/1366033
[4]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23834738/1366033
[5]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57356698/1366033
[6]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11715395/1366033
[7]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35915311/1366033
[8]: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/he
[9]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#named-character-references
[10]: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-unicode
[11]: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/ambiguous-ampersands
[12]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/96656/mathias-bynens
[13]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/822452/1366033

Is there a native way to encode or decode [HTML entities][1] using JavaScript or ES6? For example, `<` would be encoded as `&lt;`. There are libraries like [`html-entities`][2] for Node.js but it feels like there should be something built into JavaScript that already handles this common need.


  [1]: https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
  [2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-entities