Strings
PHP Manual

htmlentities

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

htmlentities — Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities

Description

string htmlentities ( string $string [, int $quote_style [, string $charset [, bool $double_encode ]]] )

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.

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

Parameters

string

The input string.

quote_style

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:

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

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

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.

double_encode

When double_encode is turned off PHP will not encode existing html entities. The default is to convert everything.

Return Values

Returns the encoded string.

ChangeLog

Version Description
5.2.3 The double_encode parameter was added.
4.1.0 The charset parameter was added.
4.0.3 The quote_style parameter was added.

Examples

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($strENT_QUOTES);
?>

See Also


Strings
PHP Manual