HTML to Chinese

Reading a text that arrived as codes

Sooner or later you receive Chinese that is not Chinese: a message where every character has become a numeric reference, a page whose source you can read but whose display is broken, an export from a system that escaped everything it did not recognise. The text is not lost. It is encoded, and the encoding is reversible.

This tool does the reversal. It takes numeric HTML references, decimal or hexadecimal, and returns the characters they stand for. Anything that is not an escape sequence passes through unchanged, so you can paste a whole message rather than pick out the fragments.

It is the counterpart of the Chinese to HTML converter, and the pair is worth keeping in mind together: one prepares text for a channel that cannot carry it, the other recovers text that has come through such a channel. Neither changes a single character of meaning.