(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)
html_entity_decode — Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters
$string
[, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401
[, string $encoding = 'UTF-8'
]] )
html_entity_decode() is the opposite of
htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities
in the string to their applicable characters.
string
The input string.
flags
A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes and which document type to use. The default is ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401.
| 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_HTML401 |
Handle code as HTML 4.01. |
ENT_XML1 |
Handle code as XML 1. |
ENT_XHTML |
Handle code as XHTML. |
ENT_HTML5 |
Handle code as HTML 5. |
encoding
Encoding to use. If omitted, the default value for this argument is ISO-8859-1 in versions of PHP prior to 5.4.0, and UTF-8 from PHP 5.4.0 onwards.
The following character sets are supported:
| Charset | Aliases | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ISO-8859-1 | ISO8859-1 | Western European, Latin-1. |
| ISO-8859-5 | ISO8859-5 | Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic). |
| 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. |
| cp1251 | Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 | Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. |
| cp1252 | Windows-1252, 1252 | Windows specific charset for Western European. |
| KOI8-R | koi8-ru, koi8r | Russian. |
| 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, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 | Japanese |
| EUC-JP | EUCJP, eucJP-win | Japanese |
| MacRoman | Charset that was used by Mac OS. | |
| '' | 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.
Returns the decoded string.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 5.4.0 | Default encoding changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. |
| 5.4.0 |
The constants ENT_HTML401, ENT_XML1,
ENT_XHTML and ENT_HTML5 were added.
|
| 5.0.0 | Support for multi-byte encodings 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
?>
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 encoding.