Turn an address into HTML entities

Site owners and content creators can use this before publishing a page or preparing it for sharing. Turn an address into HTML entities.

Turn an address into HTML entities. The result appears instantly in your browser, ready to copy, with no account, upload or storage involved.

How to use

Enter the address you want to protect in the input area, on one line with no surrounding text.
Choose the encoding style, decimal entities or hexadecimal entities, depending on how your page is written.
Run the conversion and paste the resulting string into your page source where the plain address used to sit.
Reload the published page and confirm the address still appears correctly in a visitor browser.
Use the reverse mode whenever you need to read an encoded string you cannot interpret at a glance.

Example

The sample holds a plain address. After converting, compare the length of the output with the original: it grows noticeably, because every character becomes a short code. On the live page, visitors still see the readable address.

Input

hello@example.com

Output

<a href="mailto:&#104;&#101;&#108;&#108;&#111;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;">&#104;&#101;&#108;&#108;&#111;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;</a>

Limits and formats

Encoding does not hide the address: a program reading the page source can rebuild it without much effort.
The output belongs in page markup, not in a plain text field where it would be displayed literally.
The reverse mode expects a string produced by the same method; an ordinary address does not need decoding.
Always test the page afterwards, since some editors can alter the string while saving.

Where processing happens

The conversion happens entirely in the browser: the address you type is never sent anywhere and the result appears on the spot. Nothing is retained once the tab is closed.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the output so much longer?

Every character of the address is replaced by an entity that starts with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon. The source text becomes harder for a script to scan for addresses, yet the browser still displays exactly the same address to your visitors.

Does this really stop spam?

It slows down the simpler robots that scan pages for plain addresses. A determined collector can still interpret the page source and rebuild the address, so treat this as an obstacle rather than a guarantee.

Can I get the original address back?

Yes, a decoding mode turns the encoded string into a readable address. Paste the whole string without removing any of the intermediate characters and run the decoding step to recover what you started with.