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PHP htmlentities() Function

❮ PHP String Reference

Example

Convert some characters to HTML entities:

<?php
$str = '<a href="https://www.w3schools.com">Go to w3schools.com</a>';
echo htmlentities($str);
?>

The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):

&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3schools.com&quot;&gt;Go to w3schools.com&lt;/a&gt;

The browser output of the code above will be:

<a href="https://www.w3schools.com">Go to w3schools.com</a>
Run example »

Definition and Usage

The htmlentities() function converts characters to HTML entities.

Tip: To convert HTML entities back to characters, use the html_entity_decode() function.

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


Syntax

htmlentities(string,flags,character-set,double_encode)

Parameter Description
string Required. Specifies the string to convert
flags Optional. Specifies how to handle quotes, invalid encoding and the used document type.

The available quote styles are:

  • ENT_COMPAT - Default. Encodes only double quotes
  • ENT_QUOTES - Encodes double and single quotes
  • ENT_NOQUOTES - Does not encode any quotes

Invalid encoding:

  • ENT_IGNORE - Ignores invalid encoding instead of having the function return an empty string. Should be avoided, as it may have security implications.
  • ENT_SUBSTITUTE - Replaces invalid encoding for a specified character set with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; instead of returning an empty string.
  • ENT_DISALLOWED - Replaces code points that are invalid in the specified doctype with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD;

Additional flags for specifying the used doctype:

  • ENT_HTML401 - Default. Handle code as HTML 4.01
  • ENT_HTML5 - Handle code as HTML 5
  • ENT_XML1 - Handle code as XML 1
  • ENT_XHTML - Handle code as XHTML
character-set Optional. A string that specifies which character-set to use.

Allowed values are:

  • UTF-8 - Default. ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode
  • ISO-8859-1 - Western European
  • ISO-8859-15 - Western European (adds the Euro sign + French and Finnish letters missing in ISO-8859-1)
  • 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
  • Shift_JIS - Japanese
  • EUC-JP - Japanese
  • MacRoman - Character-set that was used by Mac OS

Note: Unrecognized character-sets will be ignored and replaced by ISO-8859-1 in versions prior to PHP 5.4. As of PHP 5.4, it will be ignored an replaced by UTF-8.

double_encode Optional. A boolean value that specifies whether to encode existing html entities or not.
  • TRUE - Default. Will convert everything
  • FALSE - Will not encode existing html entities


Technical Details

Return Value: Returns the converted string

If the string contains invalid encoding, it will return an empty string, unless either the ENT_IGNORE or ENT_SUBSTITUTE flags are set
PHP Version: 4+
Changelog: The default value for the character-set parameter was changed to UTF-8 in PHP 5

ENT_SUBSTITUTE, ENT_DISALLOWED, ENT_HTML401, ENT_HTML5, ENT_XML1 and ENT_XHTML were added in PHP 5.4

ENT_IGNORE was added in PHP 5.3

The double_encode parameter was added in PHP 5.2.3

The character-set parameter was added in PHP 4.1

More Examples

Example 1

Convert some characters to HTML entities:

<?php
$str = "Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_COMPAT); // Will only convert double quotes
echo "<br>";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES); // Converts double and single quotes
echo "<br>";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_NOQUOTES); // Does not convert any quotes
?>

The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):

Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC&sup2;'<br>
Albert Einstein said: &#039;E=MC&sup2;&#039;<br>
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC&sup2;'

The browser output of the code above will be:

Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Run example »

Example 2

Convert some characters to HTML entities using the Western European character-set:

<?php
$str = "My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"); // Will only convert double quotes (not single quotes), and uses the character-set Western European
?>

The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
My name is &Oslash;yvind &Aring;sane. I&#039;m Norwegian.
</body>
</html>

The browser output of the code above will be:

My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.
Run example »

❮ PHP String Reference