If you need something that converts &#[0-9]+ entities to UTF-8, this is simple and works:
<?php
/* Entity crap. /
$input = "Fovič";
$output = preg_replace_callback("/(&#[0-9]+;)/", function($m) { return mb_convert_encoding($m[1], "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES"); }, $input);
/* Plain UTF-8. */
echo $output;
?>
html_entity_decode
(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
html_entity_decode — Convert 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 flagsconstantsConstant Name Description 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_SUBSTITUTEReplace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string. ENT_HTML401Handle code as HTML 4.01. ENT_XML1Handle code as XML 1. ENT_XHTMLHandle code as XHTML. ENT_HTML5Handle code as HTML 5. -
encoding -
An optional argument defining the encoding used when converting characters.
If omitted,
encodingdefaults 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 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.
Return Values
Returns the decoded string.
Changelog
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 8.1.0 |
flags changed from ENT_COMPAT to ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.
|
| 8.0.0 |
encoding 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 "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
?>Notes
Note:
You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode(' ')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the ' ' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 encoding.
See Also
- htmlentities() - Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
- htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities
- get_html_translation_table() - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities
- urldecode() - Decodes URL-encoded string
add a note
User Contributed Notes 20 notes
Martin ¶
13 years ago
txnull ¶
9 years ago
Use the following to decode all entities:
<?php html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8') ?>
I've checked these special entities:
- double quotes (")
- single quotes (' and ')
- non printable chars (e.g. )
With other $flags some or all won't be decoded.
It seems that ENT_XML1 and ENT_XHTML are identical when decoding.
aidan at php dot net ¶
20 years ago
This functionality is now implemented in the PEAR package PHP_Compat.
More information about using this function without upgrading your version of PHP can be found on the below link:
http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Compat
Benjamin ¶
11 years ago
The following function decodes named and numeric HTML entities and works on UTF-8. Requires iconv.
function decodeHtmlEnt($str) {
$ret = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$p2 = -1;
for(;;) {
$p = strpos($ret, '&#', $p2+1);
if ($p === FALSE)
break;
$p2 = strpos($ret, ';', $p);
if ($p2 === FALSE)
break;
if (substr($ret, $p+2, 1) == 'x')
$char = hexdec(substr($ret, $p+3, $p2-$p-3));
else
$char = intval(substr($ret, $p+2, $p2-$p-2));
//echo "$char\n";
$newchar = iconv(
'UCS-4', 'UTF-8',
chr(($char>>24)&0xFF).chr(($char>>16)&0xFF).chr(($char>>8)&0xFF).chr($char&0xFF)
);
//echo "$newchar<$p<$p2<<\n";
$ret = substr_replace($ret, $newchar, $p, 1+$p2-$p);
$p2 = $p + strlen($newchar);
}
return $ret;
}
Daniel A. ¶
6 years ago
I wanted to use this function today and I found the documentation, especially about the flags, not particularly helpful.
Running the code below, for example, failed because the flag I used was the wrong one...
$string = 'Donna's Bakery';
$title = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_HTML401, 'UTF-8');
echo $title;
The correct flag to use in this case is ENT_QUOTES.
My understanding of the flag to use is the one that would correspond to the expected, converted outcome. So, ENT_QUOTES for a character that would be a single or double quote when converted... and so on.
Please help make the documentation a bit clearer.
Matt Robinson ¶
15 years ago
I wrote in a previous comment that html_entity_decode() only handled about 100 characters. That's not quite true; it only handles entities that exist in the output character set (the third argument). If you want to get ALL HTML entities, make sure you use ENT_QUOTES and set the third argument to 'UTF-8'.
If you don't want a UTF-8 string, you'll need to convert it afterward with something like utf8_decode(), iconv(), or mb_convert_encoding().
If you're producing XML, which doesn't recognise most HTML entities:
When producing a UTF-8 document (the default), then htmlspecialchars(html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8') (because you only need to escape < and > and & unless you're printing inside the XML tags themselves).
Otherwise, either convert all the named entities to numeric ones, or declare the named entities in the document's DTD. The full list of 252 entities can be found in the HTML 4.01 Spec, or you can cut and paste the function from my site (http://inanimatt.com/php-convert-entities.php).
php dot net at c dash ovidiu dot tk ¶
19 years ago
Quick & dirty code that translates numeric entities to UTF-8.
<?php
function replace_num_entity($ord)
{
$ord = $ord[1];
if (preg_match('/^x([0-9a-f]+)$/i', $ord, $match))
{
$ord = hexdec($match[1]);
}
else
{
$ord = intval($ord);
}
$no_bytes = 0;
$byte = array();
if ($ord < 128)
{
return chr($ord);
}
elseif ($ord < 2048)
{
$no_bytes = 2;
}
elseif ($ord < 65536)
{
$no_bytes = 3;
}
elseif ($ord < 1114112)
{
$no_bytes = 4;
}
else
{
return;
}
switch($no_bytes)
{
case 2:
{
$prefix = array(31, 192);
break;
}
case 3:
{
$prefix = array(15, 224);
break;
}
case 4:
{
$prefix = array(7, 240);
}
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $no_bytes; $i++)
{
$byte[$no_bytes - $i - 1] = (($ord & (63 * pow(2, 6 * $i))) / pow(2, 6 * $i)) & 63 | 128;
}
$byte[0] = ($byte[0] & $prefix[0]) | $prefix[1];
$ret = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $no_bytes; $i++)
{
$ret .= chr($byte[$i]);
}
return $ret;
}
$test = 'This is a čא test'';
echo $test . "<br />\n";
echo preg_replace_callback('/&#([0-9a-fx]+);/mi', 'replace_num_entity', $test);
?>
Free at Key dot no ¶
14 years ago
Handy function to convert remaining HTML-entities into human readable chars (for entities which do not exist in target charset):
<?php
function cleanString($in,$offset=null)
{
$out = trim($in);
if (!empty($out))
{
$entity_start = strpos($out,'&',$offset);
if ($entity_start === false)
{
// ideal
return $out;
}
else
{
$entity_end = strpos($out,';',$entity_start);
if ($entity_end === false)
{
return $out;
}
// zu lang um eine entity zu sein
else if ($entity_end > $entity_start+7)
{
// und weiter gehts
$out = cleanString($out,$entity_start+1);
}
// gottcha!
else
{
$clean = substr($out,0,$entity_start);
$subst = substr($out,$entity_start+1,1);
// š => "s" / š => "_"
$clean .= ($subst != "#") ? $subst : "_";
$clean .= substr($out,$entity_end+1);
// und weiter gehts
$out = cleanString($clean,$entity_start+1);
}
}
}
return $out;
}
?>
neurotic dot neu at gmail dot com ¶
14 years ago
This is a safe rawurldecode with utf8 detection:
<?php
function utf8_rawurldecode($raw_url_encoded){
$enc = rawurldecode($raw_url_encoded);
if(utf8_encode(utf8_decode($enc))==$enc){;
return rawurldecode($raw_url_encoded);
}else{
return utf8_encode(rawurldecode($raw_url_encoded));
}
}
?>
Anonymous ¶
3 years ago
Why doesn't the html_entity_decode() function convert entities without the last semicolon (like A or A) to characters?
---
<?php
echo 'like A or A';
---
Browser displays fine:
----
like A or A
me at richardsnazell dot com ¶
16 years ago
I had a problem getting the 'TM' trademark symbol to display correctly in an email subject line. Using html_entity_decode() with different charsets didn't work, but directly replacing the entity with it's ASCII equivalent did:
$subject = str_replace('™', chr(153), $subject);
Victor ¶
12 years ago
We were having very peculiar behavior regarding foreign characters such as e-acute.
However, it was only showing up as a problem when extracting those characters out of our mysql database and when being displayed through a proxy server of ours that handles dns issues.
As other users have made a note of, the default character setting wasn't what they were expecting it to be when they left theirs blank.
When we changed our default_charset to "UTF-8", our problems and needs for using functions like these were no longer necessary in handling foreign characters such as e-acute. Good enough for us!
jojo ¶
18 years ago
The decipherment does the character encoded by the escape function of JavaScript.
When the multi byte is used on the page, it is effective.
javascript escape('aaああaa') ..... 'aa%u3042%u3042aa'
php jsEscape_decode('aa%u3042%u3042aa')..'aaああaa'
<?php
function jsEscape_decode($jsEscaped,$outCharCode='SJIS'){
$arrMojis = explode("%u",$jsEscaped);
for ($i = 1;$i < count($arrMojis);$i++){
$c = substr($arrMojis[$i],0,4);
$cc = mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*',$c),$outCharCode,'UTF-16');
$arrMojis[$i] = substr_replace($arrMojis[$i],$cc,0,4);
}
return implode('',$arrMojis);
}
?>
florianborn (at) yahoo (dot) de ¶
19 years ago
Note that
<?php
echo urlencode(html_entity_decode(" "));
?>
will output "%A0" instead of "+".
marion at figmentthinking dot com ¶
15 years ago
I just ran into the:
Bug #27626 html_entity_decode bug - cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()!
The simple solution if you're still running PHP 4 is to wrap the html_entity_decode() function with the utf8_decode() function.
<?php
$string = ' ';
$utf8_encode = utf8_encode(html_entity_decode($string));
?>
By default html_entity_decode() returns the ISO-8859-1 character set, and by default utf8_decode()...
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-decode.php
"Converts a string with ISO-8859-1 characters encoded with UTF-8 to single-byte ISO-8859-1"
slickriptide at gmail dot com ¶
8 years ago
When using this function, it's a good idea to pay attention when it says that leaving the charset parameter empty is "not recommended".
I had an issue where I was storing text files, with entities converted, into a database. When I retrieved them later and ran
$text_file = html_entity_decode($text_data);
the entities were NOT decoded.
Once I was aware of the problem, I changed the decode call to fully specify all of the parameters:
$text_file = html_entity_decode($text_data, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML5,'utf-8');
This converted the entities as expected.
daniel at brightbyte dot de ¶
20 years ago
This function seems to have to have two limitations (at least in PHP 4.3.8):
a) it does not work with multibyte character codings, such as UTF-8
b) it does not decode numeric entity references
a) can be solved by using iconv to convert to ISO-8859-1, then decoding the entities, than convert to UTF-8 again. But that's quite ugly and detroys all characters not present in Latin-1.
b) can be solved rather nicely using the following code:
<?php
function decode_entities($text) {
$text= html_entity_decode($text,ENT_QUOTES,"ISO-8859-1"); #NOTE: UTF-8 does not work!
$text= preg_replace('/&#(\d+);/me',"chr(\\1)",$text); #decimal notation
$text= preg_replace('/&#x([a-f0-9]+);/mei',"chr(0x\\1)",$text); #hex notation
return $text;
}
?>
HTH
grvg (at) free (dot) fr ¶
18 years ago
Here is the ultimate functions to convert HTML entities to UTF-8 :
The main function is htmlentities2utf8
Others are helper functions
<?php
function chr_utf8($code)
{
if ($code < 0) return false;
elseif ($code < 128) return chr($code);
elseif ($code < 160) // Remove Windows Illegals Cars
{
if ($code==128) $code=8364;
elseif ($code==129) $code=160; // not affected
elseif ($code==130) $code=8218;
elseif ($code==131) $code=402;
elseif ($code==132) $code=8222;
elseif ($code==133) $code=8230;
elseif ($code==134) $code=8224;
elseif ($code==135) $code=8225;
elseif ($code==136) $code=710;
elseif ($code==137) $code=8240;
elseif ($code==138) $code=352;
elseif ($code==139) $code=8249;
elseif ($code==140) $code=338;
elseif ($code==141) $code=160; // not affected
elseif ($code==142) $code=381;
elseif ($code==143) $code=160; // not affected
elseif ($code==144) $code=160; // not affected
elseif ($code==145) $code=8216;
elseif ($code==146) $code=8217;
elseif ($code==147) $code=8220;
elseif ($code==148) $code=8221;
elseif ($code==149) $code=8226;
elseif ($code==150) $code=8211;
elseif ($code==151) $code=8212;
elseif ($code==152) $code=732;
elseif ($code==153) $code=8482;
elseif ($code==154) $code=353;
elseif ($code==155) $code=8250;
elseif ($code==156) $code=339;
elseif ($code==157) $code=160; // not affected
elseif ($code==158) $code=382;
elseif ($code==159) $code=376;
}
if ($code < 2048) return chr(192 | ($code >> 6)) . chr(128 | ($code & 63));
elseif ($code < 65536) return chr(224 | ($code >> 12)) . chr(128 | (($code >> 6) & 63)) . chr(128 | ($code & 63));
else return chr(240 | ($code >> 18)) . chr(128 | (($code >> 12) & 63)) . chr(128 | (($code >> 6) & 63)) . chr(128 | ($code & 63));
}
// Callback for preg_replace_callback('~&(#(x?))?([^;]+);~', 'html_entity_replace', $str);
function html_entity_replace($matches)
{
if ($matches[2])
{
return chr_utf8(hexdec($matches[3]));
} elseif ($matches[1])
{
return chr_utf8($matches[3]);
}
switch ($matches[3])
{
case "nbsp": return chr_utf8(160);
case "iexcl": return chr_utf8(161);
case "cent": return chr_utf8(162);
case "pound": return chr_utf8(163);
case "curren": return chr_utf8(164);
case "yen": return chr_utf8(165);
//... etc with all named HTML entities
}
return false;
}
function htmlentities2utf8 ($string) // because of the html_entity_decode() bug with UTF-8
{
$string = preg_replace_callback('~&(#(x?))?([^;]+);~', 'html_entity_replace', $string);
return $string;
}
?>
jl dot garcia at gmail dot com ¶
15 years ago
I created this function to filter all the text that goes in or comes out of the database.
<?php
function filter_string($string, $nohtml='', $save='') {
if(!empty($nohtml)) {
$string = trim($string);
if(!empty($save)) $string = htmlentities(trim($string), ENT_QUOTES, 'ISO-8859-15');
else $string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'ISO-8859-15');
}
if(!empty($save)) $string = mysql_real_escape_string($string);
else $string = stripslashes($string);
return($string);
}
?>
kae at verens dot com ¶
16 years ago
the references to 'chr()' in the example unhtmlentities() function should be changed to unichr, using the example unichr() function described in the 'chr' reference (http://php.net/chr).
the reason for this is characters such as € which do not break down into an ASCII number (that's the Euro, by the way).
