(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)
html_entity_decode — Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters
html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from string .
The input string.
The optional second quote_style 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:
| 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. |
The ISO-8859-1 character set is used as default for the optional third charset . This defines the character set used in conversion.
Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later.
| 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 |
Note: Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.
Returns the decoded string.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 5.0.0 | Support for multi-byte character sets was added. |
Example #1 Decoding HTML entities
<?php
$orig = "I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now";
$a = htmlentities($orig);
$b = html_entity_decode($a);
echo $a; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
// For users prior to PHP 4.3.0 you may do this:
function unhtmlentities($string)
{
// replace numeric entities
$string = preg_replace('~&#x([0-9a-f]+);~ei', 'chr(hexdec("\\1"))', $string);
$string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr("\\1")', $string);
// replace literal entities
$trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
$trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl);
return strtr($string, $trans_tbl);
}
$c = unhtmlentities($a);
echo $c; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
?>
Note: You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode(' ')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the ' ' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 characterset.