do crawlers decode html entities?

Question

i was wondering if the crawlers and robots can decode html entities for example in my html i have something like:

salariés

do they read it like that? or something like:

salariés

which option is better for SEO?

Answer 1

Most of the crawlers will decode your entities, as they need pure text to compute the data and extract information.

If you want to help them, use an appropriate encoding (as utf8), a good charset meta, and avoid html entities.

Answer 2

I'd say you can safely assume that HTML entities are properly decoded. They are valid HTML, and a crawler not decoding them would end up with tons of broken content.