XML Escape & Unescape

XML defines exactly five predefined entities: & (&), < (<), > (>), " (") and ' ('). Unlike HTML there is no   or © unless a DTD declares it — a common cause of “undefined entity” parse errors when HTML snippets are pasted into XML, RSS or SVG.

In element text only & and < must be escaped (and > in the sequence ]]>); this tool always escapes all three. Inside attribute values the quote that delimits the value must also be escaped, which is what “Escape quotes” does. Tick “Non-ASCII as &#xNN;” when the document must be pure ASCII or its encoding is uncertain.

Unescaping converts the five entities and decimal or hex character references such as © and é. Any other named entity is left untouched and counted in the status line, because only the document's DTD could define it. Invalid code points such as � are reported as errors.