While doing HTML work I tend to do my work with text editors. For this, I use Arachnophilia a Java HTML editor with easy, editable, customizable tags (Review here).
Arachnophilia has support to convert characters to HTML entities but isn’t easy to get to (HTML > More Functions > Char to Entity. There are various web sites that do but if willing to use the terminal they can be quickly gotten there as well. Thanks to script by Darren this can be done easily. It requires script Perls’ HTML::Entities module to do so (for help installing Perl modules look at this page). You’ll probably need redirect the script to point to the Perl program proper:
whereis perl
More than likely its in /usr/bin/perl. After fixing that run the script. This will put you in a sub-shell that you can copy and paste characters to be encoded:
You can also convert a whole file. This will print to standard output (terminal text):
htmlentities filename
Or convert a file by doing:
htmlentities < file > convertedfile
Yikes, the buttons take up half the screen in that program.
Yeah, I know, and you can add more too. The bottom line is just what I use for my blog.