html_entity_decode
(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)
html_entity_decode — Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters
Description
html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from string.
Parameters
- string
-
The input string.
- quote_style
-
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:
Available quote_style 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. - charset
-
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.
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 Note: Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.
Return Values
Returns the decoded string.
Changelog
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 5.0.0 | Support for multi-byte character sets was added. |
Examples
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
?>
Notes
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.
See Also
- htmlentities() - Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
- htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities
- get_html_translation_table() - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities
- urldecode() - Decodes URL-encoded string