html_entity_decode

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

html_entity_decodeConvert HTML entities to their corresponding characters

Description

html_entity_decode(string$string, int$flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401, ?string$encoding = null): string

html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts HTML entities in the string to their corresponding characters.

More precisely, this function decodes all the entities (including all numeric entities) that a) are necessarily valid for the chosen document type — i.e., for XML, this function does not decode named entities that might be defined in some DTD — and b) whose character or characters are in the coded character set associated with the chosen encoding and are permitted in the chosen document type. All other entities are left as is.

Parameters

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_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

Available flags 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.
ENT_SUBSTITUTE Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
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

An optional argument defining the encoding used when converting characters.

If omitted, encoding defaults to the value of the default_charset configuration option.

Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to specify the correct value for your code if the default_charset configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.

The following character sets are supported:

Supported charsets
CharsetAliasesDescription
ISO-8859-1ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1.
ISO-8859-5ISO8859-5 Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
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.
cp1251Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset.
cp1252Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European.
KOI8-Rkoi8-ru, koi8r Russian.
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, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 Japanese
EUC-JPEUCJP, 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.

Return Values

Returns the decoded string.

Changelog

VersionDescription
8.1.0flags changed from ENT_COMPAT to ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.
8.0.0encoding is nullable now.

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 &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now

echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
?>

Notes

Note:

You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode('&nbsp;')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the '&nbsp;' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 encoding.

See Also

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