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htmlentities

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

htmlentities --  Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities

Description

string htmlentities ( string string [, int quote_style [, string charset]] )

This function is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except with htmlentities(), all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.

Like htmlspecialchars(), 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:

Table 1. Available quote_style constants

Constant NameDescription
ENT_COMPATWill convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.
ENT_QUOTESWill convert both double and single quotes.
ENT_NOQUOTESWill leave both double and single quotes unconverted.

Support for the optional quote parameter was added in PHP 4.0.3.

Like htmlspecialchars(), it takes an optional third argument charset which defines character set used in conversion. Support for this argument was added in PHP 4.1.0. Presently, the ISO-8859-1 character set is used as the default.

Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later.

Table 2. Supported charsets

CharsetAliasesDescription
ISO-8859-1ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1
ISO-8859-15ISO8859-15 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.
cp866ibm866, 866 DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
cp1251Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
cp1252Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European.
KOI8-Rkoi8-ru, koi8r Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
BIG5950 Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan.
GB2312936 Simplified Chinese, national standard character set.
BIG5-HKSCS  Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese.
Shift_JISSJIS, 932 Japanese
EUC-JPEUCJP Japanese

Note: Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.

If you're wanting to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().

Example 1. A htmlentities() example

<?php
$str = "A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>";

// Outputs: A 'quote' is &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt;
echo htmlentities($str);

// Outputs: A &#039;quote&#039; is &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt;
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES);
?>

See also html_entity_decode(), get_html_translation_table(), htmlspecialchars(), nl2br(), and urlencode().

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