entities

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

Features

• ⚔️ Battle tested: 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 fastes library for decoding HTML entities (as of August 2021); see performance.
• 🎛 Configurable: Get an output tailored for your needs. You are fine with UTF8? That'll safe you some bytes. Prefer to only have ASCII characters? We can do that as well!

How to…

…install entities

npm install entities

…use entities

const entities = require("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

This is how entities compares to other libraries on a very basic benchmark (see scripts/benchmark.ts, for 10,000,000 iterations; lower is better):

Library	Version	decode perf	encode perf	escape perf
entities	3.0.1	1.418s	6.786s	2.196s
html-entities	2.3.2	2.530s	6.829s	2.415s
he	1.2.0	5.800s	24.237s	3.624s
parse-entities	3.0.0	9.660s	N/A	N/A

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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?

Strict decoding is for decoding entities in attributes, as well as in legacy environments. When strict decoding, entities not terminated with a semicolon will be ignored.

Why should I use entities instead of alternative modules?

As of August 2021, entities is a bit faster than other modules. Still, this is not a very 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?

This depends on your bundler, but yes, it should! Eg. recent versions of Webpack are able to tree-shake commonjs projects, and having the sideEffects flag in the package.json set to false means that your bundles should be much smaller.

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Acknowledgements

This libary 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!

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License: BSD-2-Clause

Security contact information

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