htmlentities
(PHP 4, PHP 5)
htmlentities — Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
Description
This function is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except with htmlentities(), all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.
If you're wanting to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().
Parameters
- string
-
The input string.
- flags
-
Like htmlspecialchars(), the optional second flags parameter lets you define what will be done with 'single' and "double" quotes. It takes on one of three constants with the default being ENT_COMPAT, optionally combined with a fourth ENT_IGNORE (since PHP 5.3.0):
Available flags constants Constant Name Description ENT_COMPAT Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone. ENT_QUOTES Will convert both double and single quotes. ENT_NOQUOTES Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted. ENT_IGNORE Silently discard invalid code unit sequences instead of returning an empty string. Added in PHP 5.3.0. This is provided for backwards compatibility; avoid using it as it may have security implications. - charset
-
Like htmlspecialchars(), it takes an optional third argument charset which defines character set used in conversion. Presently, the ISO-8859-1 character set is used as the default. However, this default is very likely to change in future versions of PHP; the programmer is highly encouraged to specify a value.
Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later.
Supported charsets Charset Aliases Description ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1 ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish letters missing in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). UTF-8 ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode. cp866 ibm866, 866 DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European. KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. BIG5 950 Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan. GB2312 936 Simplified Chinese, national standard character set. BIG5-HKSCS Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese. Shift_JIS SJIS, 932 Japanese EUC-JP EUCJP Japanese '' An empty string activates detection from script encoding (Zend multibyte), default_charset and current locale (see nl_langinfo() and setlocale()), in this order. Not recommended. Note: Any other character sets are not recognized. The default encoding will be used instead and a warning will be emitted.
- double_encode
-
When double_encode is turned off PHP will not encode existing html entities. The default is to convert everything.
Return Values
Returns the encoded string.
Changelog
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 5.3.0 | The constant ENT_IGNORE was added. |
| 5.2.3 | The double_encode parameter was added. |
| 4.1.0 | The charset parameter was added. |
| 4.0.3 | The flags parameter was added. |
Examples
Example #1 A htmlentities() example
<?php
$str = "A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>";
// Outputs: A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>
echo htmlentities($str);
// Outputs: A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES);
?>
Example #2 Usage of ENT_IGNORE
<?php
$str = "\x8F!!!";
// Outputs an empty string
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
// Outputs "!!!"
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8");
?>
See Also
- html_entity_decode() - Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters
- get_html_translation_table() - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities
- htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities
- nl2br() - Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string
- urlencode() - URL-encodes string