Unicode Converter

Unicode converter — encode and decode Unicode escapes, HTML entities, CSS escapes, and URL encoding

Unicode encoding appears everywhere in web development: JSON responses with \uXXXX sequences, HTML with &#xXXXX; entities, CSS with \XXXX escapes, and URLs with percent-encoding. This Unicode converter handles all five common formats in one tool, with instant encode/decode switching and zero server uploads.

Supported formats

• Unicode \uXXXX — JavaScript/JSON escape sequences like \u00e9 for e.
• HTML Hex &#xXXXX; — Hexadecimal HTML entities like é.
• HTML Dec &#DDDD; — Decimal HTML entities like é.
• CSS \XXXX — CSS escape sequences used in content properties.
• URL %XX — Percent-encoding used in query strings and paths.

Who uses this tool

Frontend developers debugging garbled text in API responses, backend engineers normalizing Unicode before storage, SEO specialists checking URL encoding for international characters, email developers working with HTML entities, and anyone who has ever seen \uXXXX in a log file and needed to read it as human text.

How to use it

1. Select the encoding format from the dropdown.
2. Paste or type your text — the output updates instantly.
3. Toggle Encode/Decode to switch direction.
4. Copy the result or swap it back to the input for further processing.

Privacy and browser-side processing

All encoding and decoding happens in your browser. Your text never leaves your device. This is especially important when working with private data, internal logs, or any text that should not be sent to a third-party service.

Code points, code units, and why they matter

A character like 😀 looks like one symbol, but under the hood it can be a single Unicode code point (U+1F600) encoded as one or more UTF-8 bytes and one or two UTF-16 code units. This converter shows you all three layers — the code point, the UTF-8 byte sequence, and the UTF-16 representation — so you can debug encoding bugs in databases, network payloads, and source files.

Use cases

• Database mojibake — paste a garbled string and inspect the actual byte sequence to identify whether it's double-encoded UTF-8, Latin-1 mistaken for UTF-8, or vice versa.
• Emoji compatibility — confirm that an emoji is a single code point or a Zero-Width Joiner sequence (ZWJ) like 👨‍👩‍👧 which is five code points joined.
• Security analysis — detect homograph attacks where Cyrillic "а" looks identical to Latin "a" by reading the code points.
• URL and filename normalization — verify that visually identical strings have the same NFC / NFD canonical form before storing them as keys.
• Source-code review — spot invisible characters (zero-width space, right-to-left override) that have been used in supply-chain attacks.

What you can convert

Paste any text to see its code points in decimal and hex, its UTF-8 byte sequence in hex, its UTF-16 representation, and a per-character breakdown. Convert in the other direction by pasting U+XXXX code points, \uXXXX escapes, or hex byte sequences and seeing the resulting text.

Related tools

People using the Unicode converter often also use URL Encoder, Base64 Encoder, HTML to Markdown, and JSON Formatter.