PHP htmlentities() Function

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PHP htmlentities()

The htmlentities() function converts all applicable characters to HTML entities.

Tips: If you want to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().

Tips: Use the get_html_translation_table() function to return the translation table used by htmlentities().

Example

PHP Compiler
<?php $str = "H<sub>2</sub>0"; echo "Actual: " . $str . "<br>"; echo "HTML: " . htmlentities($str); ?>

Output

Actual: H20 HTML: H<sub>2</sub>0

Syntax

htmlentities(str, flag, character-set, double_encode)

Parameter Values

ValueTypeExplanation
strRequiredSpecifies the input string.
flagOptionalSpecifies how to handle quotes, invalid code unit sequences and the used document type.
Possible Values:
  • ENT_COMPAT - Table will contain entities for double-quotes, but not for single-quotes.
  • ENT_QUOTES - Table will contain entities for both double and single quotes.
  • ENT_NOQUOTES - Table will neither contain entities for single quotes nor for double quotes.
  • ENT_SUBSTITUTE - Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
  • ENT_DISALLOWED - Replace invalid code points for the given document type with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; (otherwise) instead of leaving them as is.
  • ENT_HTML5 - Handle code as HTML 5.
  • ENT_HTML401 - Handle code as HTML 4.01.
  • ENT_XML1 - Handle code as XML 1.
  • ENT_XHTML - Handle code as XHTML.
Default value is ENT_COMPAT.
character-setOptionalSpecifies the character-set to use when converting characters.
Possible Values:
  • ISO-8859-1 - Western European, Latin-1.
  • ISO-8859-5 - Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
  • ISO-8859-15 - 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 - DOS-specific Cyrillic charset.
  • cp1251 - Windows-specific Cyrillic charset.
  • cp1252 - Windows specific charset for Western European.
  • KOI8-R - Russian.
  • BIG5 - Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan.
  • GB2312 - Simplified Chinese, national standard character set.
  • BIG5-HKSCS - Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese.
  • Shift_JIS - Japanese
  • EUC-JP - Japanese
  • MacRoman - Charset that was used by Mac OS.
Default value is 'UTF-8' (PHP 5.4.0 and above).
double_encodeOptionalSpecifies whether to encode existing html entities or not.
Possible Values:
  • TRUE - Will convert everything
  • FALSE - Will not encode existing html entities
Default value is TRUE.

Return Value

ValueExplanation
NumberReturns the encoded string.

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