HTML encoding is a technique used to convert special characters in HTML code into their equivalent HTML entities. This is done to ensure that the characters are displayed correctly in web pages and to prevent them from being interpreted as code or markup. HTML encoding is important for security reasons as well, as it helps prevent attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) by encoding potentially dangerous characters.
There are many special characters that need to be encoded in HTML, including <, >, ", ', &, and other characters that have special meaning in HTML code. To encode these characters, they are replaced with their corresponding HTML entities. For example, the < character is replaced with <, the > character is replaced with >, and so on.
HTML encoding can be done manually by replacing the special characters with their HTML entities, but this can be time-consuming and prone to errors. There are also many online tools and libraries available that can automatically HTML encode text, making the process much easier.
One important use case for HTML encoding is when displaying user input on a web page. If user input is not properly encoded, it can be interpreted as HTML code by the browser, which can lead to security vulnerabilities. For example, if a user inputs a
