entities

Encode & decode HTML & XML entities with ease & speed.

Features

• 😇 Tried and true: entities is used by many popular libraries; eg. htmlparser2, the official AWS SDK and commonmark use it to process HTML entities.
• ⚡️ Fast: entities is the fastest library for decoding HTML entities (as of September 2025); see performance.
• 🎛 Configurable: Get an output tailored for your needs. You are fine with UTF8? That'll save you some bytes. Prefer to only have ASCII characters? We can do that as well!

How to…

…install entities

npm install entities

…use entities

import * as entities from "entities";

// Encoding
entities.escapeUTF8("& ü"); // "& ü"
entities.encodeXML("& ü"); // "& ü"
entities.encodeHTML("& ü"); // "& ü"

// Decoding
entities.decodeXML("asdf & ÿ ü '"); // "asdf & ÿ ü '"
entities.decodeHTML("asdf & ÿ ü '"); // "asdf & ÿ ü '"

Performance

Benchmarked in October 2026 with Node v26.9.0 on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (median of three runs). Other libraries are shown relative to entities.

Decoding

| Library | Short text (49 B) | Plain prose (4.0 KiB) | Prose with references (4.0 KiB) | All named references (19.9 KiB) | Numeric references (4.0 KiB) | | -------------------- | ----------------: | --------------------: | ------------------------------: | ------------------------------: | ---------------------------: | | entities | 578 MB/s | 131,381 MB/s | 1,425 MB/s | 161 MB/s | 272 MB/s | | html-entities 2.6.0 | 5.5× slower | 61× slower | 4.8× slower | 2.7× slower | 7.1× slower | | he 2.0.0 | 7.8× slower | 61× slower | 7.5× slower | 5.0× slower | 8.0× slower | | parse-entities 4.0.2 | 14× slower | 1,040× slower | 30× slower | 13× slower | 5.0× slower | | ent 2.2.2 | 10× slower | 61× slower | 10× slower | 6.9× slower | 11× slower |

entities returns input without & after a single indexOf scan, hence the plain prose result.

Encoding

| Library | Short text (48 B) | ASCII prose (4.0 KiB) | Accented prose (4.0 KiB) | CJK and emoji (4.0 KiB) | | ------------------------ | ----------------: | --------------------: | -----------------------: | ----------------------: | | entities | 195 MB/s | 1,107 MB/s | 251 MB/s | 127 MB/s | | html-entities 2.6.0 | 3.0× slower | 1.1× slower | 1.6× slower | 2.7× slower | | he 2.0.0 | 9.4× slower | 2.0× slower | 4.3× slower | 4.4× slower | | stringify-entities 4.0.4 | 8.0× slower | 1.7× slower | 3.8× slower | 5.6× slower | | ent 2.2.2 | 14× slower | 98× slower | 23× slower | 5.3× slower |

Escaping

| Library | Short text (48 B) | Prose (4.0 KiB) | Markup (4.1 KiB) | | ------------------------ | ----------------: | --------------: | ---------------: | | entities | 326 MB/s | 4,447 MB/s | 304 MB/s | | html-entities 2.6.0 | 2.3× slower | 1.8× slower | 1.7× slower | | he 2.0.0 | 2.1× slower | 1.7× slower | 1.6× slower | | stringify-entities 4.0.4 | 3.6× slower | 2.7× slower | 2.8× slower | | html-escaper 3.0.3 | 2.2× slower | 1.7× slower | 1.6× slower | | lodash 4.18.1 | 2.4× slower | 1.8× slower | 1.7× slower |

Unescaping

| Library | Short text (62 B) | Prose (4.1 KiB) | Markup (5.7 KiB) | | -------------------- | ----------------: | --------------: | ---------------: | | entities | 329 MB/s | 4,552 MB/s | 410 MB/s | | html-entities 2.6.0 | 3.7× slower | 5.7× slower | 3.7× slower | | he 2.0.0 | 5.2× slower | 8.4× slower | 5.8× slower | | parse-entities 4.0.2 | 8.0× slower | 75× slower | 13× slower | | ent 2.2.2 | 7.8× slower | 11× slower | 8.9× slower | | html-escaper 3.0.3 | 2.8× slower | 5.2× slower | 3.0× slower | | lodash 4.18.1 | 3.0× slower | 4.8× slower | 3.0× slower |

Note: Micro-benchmarks may vary across machines and Node versions.

FAQ

What methods should I actually use to encode my documents?

If your target supports UTF-8, the escapeUTF8 method is going to be your best choice. Otherwise, use either encodeHTML or encodeXML based on whether you're dealing with an HTML or an XML document.

You can have a look at the options for the encode and decode methods to see everything you can configure.

When should I use strict decoding?

When strict decoding, entities not terminated with a semicolon will be ignored. This is helpful for decoding entities in legacy environments.

Why should I use entities instead of alternative modules?

As of October 2026, entities is faster than other modules. Still, this is not a differentiated space and other modules can catch up.

More importantly, you might already have entities in your dependency graph (as a dependency of eg. cheerio, or htmlparser2), and including it directly might not even increase your bundle size. The same is true for other entity libraries, so have a look through your node_modules directory!

Does entities support tree shaking?

Yes! Note that for best results, you should not use the encode and decode functions, as they wrap around a number of other functions, all of which will remain in the bundle. Instead, use the functions that you need directly.

Acknowledgements

This library wouldn't be possible without the work of these individuals. Thanks to

• @mathiasbynens for his explanations about character encodings, and his library he, which was one of the inspirations for entities
• @inikulin for his work on optimized tries for decoding HTML entities for the parse5 project
• @mdevils for taking on the challenge of producing a quick entity library with his html-entities library. entities would be quite a bit slower if there wasn't any competition. Right now entities is on top, but we'll see how long that lasts!

License: BSD-2-Clause

Security contact information

To report a security vulnerability, please use the Tidelift security contact. Tidelift will coordinate the fix and disclosure.