Learning Introduction: What is an HTML Entity Decoder?

Welcome to the foundational step in understanding web text encoding. An HTML Entity Decoder is a crucial tool for anyone working with web content, data parsing, or security. At its core, it translates HTML entities back into their original, human-readable characters. But what are HTML entities? They are special codes that begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;), used to represent characters that have reserved meanings in HTML (like < and > for < and >) or characters not easily typed on a keyboard (like © for ©).

This encoding is vital for web security and data integrity. For instance, to display the actual symbols "