Java Unescape HTML to String Example

Java examples to unescape the characters in a String. It unescapes a string containing entity escapes to a string containing the actual Unicode characters corresponding to the escapes.

StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4() [Apache Commons Text]

• This method takes escaped string as parameter. It can be null.
• It supports all known HTML 4.0 entities.

To use StringEscapeUtils, import commons-text dependency.

<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
	<artifactId>commons-text</artifactId>
	<version>1.4</version>
</dependency>

Now use StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4() method.

import org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils;

public class HTMLEscapeExample 
{
	public static void main(String[] args) 
	{
		String escapedString = "<java>public static void main(String[] args) { ... }</java>";
		
		String unEscapedHTML = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4(escapedString);
		
		System.out.println(unEscapedHTML);
	}
}

//Output:

<java>public static void main(String[] args) { ... }</java>

Happy Learning !!

References:

HTML 4.01 Character References
StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4()