Sometimes cutting and pasting content and code from websites can be fraught with frustration. Some of the biggest headache makers are escape codes- representations of uncommon characters flanked with an ampersand and hash symbol on one end and a semicolon on the other.
For example, the following escape code in an HTML document: &#copy; actually displays on screen as a copyright symbol © (a circle with a letter c inside). Get that code into almost any other document (FileMaker, Word, BBEdit) and it’s just going to be &#copy; plain and simple. This example is pretty innocuous. Even if you don’t know what &#copy; stands for, you can probably figure it out from context clues and fix it manually.
Supposed you’re faced with this code to decipher: ₳? Now what do you do? It’s code identifier is numeric, so there are no language clues there for you. It could represent any among thousands of arcane characters and hunting them down individually can suck up a lot of time.
That’s why we cobbled together a little decoder utility and loaded it with nearly 3,000 unique characters. Drop your source text into the left field and click the Parse It button and you’ll be rewarded with the actual characters on the right hand side.
Any escaped characters that make it through to the right side aren’t in our character table yet. But if you can add then by clicking the “code table” button and creating a new entry for your escape code.
Feel free to download the unlocked example file. It’s totally free, but comes with no guarantees, warranty, or promises of any type. Use of any example file from this site is solely at your own risk.
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