htmlentities

    (PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

    htmlentities — Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities

    Description

    htmlentities(
        string$string,
        int$flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401,
        ?string$encoding = null,
        bool$double_encode = true
    ): string

    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. The get_html_translation_table() function can be used to return the translation table used dependent upon the provided flags constants.

    If you want to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().

    Parameters

    string

    The input string.

    flags

    A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes, invalid code unit sequences and the used document type. 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_IGNORE Silently discard invalid code unit sequences instead of returning an empty string. Using this flag is discouraged as it » may have security implications.
    ENT_SUBSTITUTE Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
    ENT_DISALLOWED Replace invalid code points for the given document type with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; (otherwise) instead of leaving them as is. This may be useful, for instance, to ensure the well-formedness of XML documents with embedded external content.
    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.

    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.

    If the input string contains an invalid code unit sequence within the given encoding an empty string will be returned, unless either the ENT_IGNORE or ENT_SUBSTITUTE flags are set.

    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 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);
    ?>

    Example #2 Usage of ENT_IGNORE

    <?php
    $str     = "\x8F!!!";

    // Outputs an empty string
    echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");

    // Outputs "!!!"
    echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8");
    ?>

    See Also

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