Turn <, &, quotes, and other special characters into safe HTML entities, or decode them back.
How it works
Encoding works by setting your text as a hidden element's textContent, then reading back its innerHTML — the browser's own DOM serializer does the escaping, not a hand-written lookup table. Decoding runs the same trick in reverse: your entities are set as innerHTML, and the browser's HTML parser resolves them, then textContent reads out the plain result.
FAQ
Does this encode quotes and apostrophes into entities?
No — because encoding relies on the browser's own serialization, only the characters that are actually unsafe in HTML text (&, <, >) get turned into entities. Straight quotes and apostrophes are left alone since they don't need escaping outside of attribute values.
Because decoding hands your text to the browser's built-in HTML parser rather than a small hardcoded table, it recognizes the entire standard set of named HTML entities, not just & and <.
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