HTML entities are special sequences that represent characters which would otherwise be interpreted as HTML markup. For example, < represents the less-than sign (<), & represents ampersand (&), and © represents the copyright symbol (©).
Encoding HTML entities prevents XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks by neutralizing characters that could be interpreted as HTML tags. It is also needed when you want to display HTML code examples on a webpage without the browser rendering them.
Yes. It handles named entities (<, >, &, ", '), numeric decimal entities (<, >), and numeric hexadecimal entities (<, >). All processing is client-side — your text stays on your device.