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    html_entity_decode

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

    html_entity_decode — Convierte todas las entidades HTML a sus caracteres correspondientes

    Descripción

    html_entity_decode(string $string, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, string $encoding = ini_get("default_charset")): string

    html_entity_decode() es el opuesto de htmlentities() en el sentido de que convierte todas las entidades HTML del string a sus caracteres correspondientes.

    Para ser más precisos, esta función decodifica todas las entidades (incluyendo todas las entidades numéricas) que a) sean necesariamente válidas para el tipo de documento elegido — es decir, para XML, esta función no decodifica las entidades con nombres que podrían estar definidas en algunos DTD — y b) aquellos caracteres que están en el conjunto de caracteres codificado asociado con la codificación elegida y que están permitidos en el tipo de documento elegido. Todas las demás entidades se dejan tal cual.

    Parámetros

    string

    El string de entrada.

    flags

    Una máscara de bits de uno o más de los siguientes indicadores, los cuales especifican cómo manejar las comillas y el tipo de documento utilizado. El valor predeterminado es ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401.

    Constantes disponibles para flags
    Nombre de constante Descripción
    ENT_COMPAT Convertirá las comillas dobles y sólo dejará las comillas simples.
    ENT_QUOTES Convertirá tanto las comillas dobles como las simples.
    ENT_NOQUOTES Dejará tanto las comillas dobles como las simples sin convertir.
    ENT_HTML401 Manejar el código como HTML 4.01.
    ENT_XML1 Manejar el código como XML 1.
    ENT_XHTML Manejar el código como XHTML.
    ENT_HTML5 Manejar el código como HTML 5.

    encoding

    Un argumento opcional que define la codificación empleada al convertir caracteres.

    Si se omite, el valor predeterminado de encoding varía según la versión de PHP en uso. En PHP 5.6 y posterior, la opción de configuración default_charset se emplea como valor predeterminado. PHP 5.4 y 5.5 utilizarán UTF-8 como valor predeterminado. Las versiones anteriores de PHP emplean ISO-8859-1.

    Aunque este argumento es técnicamente opcional, se recomienda especificar el valor correcto para el código si se utiliza PHP 5.5 o anterior, o si la opción de configuración default_charset podría estar establecida incorrectamente para la entrada dada.

    Están soportados los siguientes juegos de caracteres:

    Juegos de caracteres soportados
    Juego de caracteres Alias Descripción
    ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Europeo occidental, Latin-1.
    ISO-8859-5 ISO8859-5 Juego de caracteres cirílicos poco usado (Latin/Cyrillic).
    ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 Europeo occidental, Latin-9. Añade el signo de euro, y letras del francés y finlandés ausentes en Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
    UTF-8   Unicode de 8 bit multibyte compatible con ASCII.
    cp866 ibm866, 866 Juego de caracteres cirílico específico de DOS.
    cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Juego de caracteres cirílico específico de Windows.
    cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Juego de caracteres específico de Windows para Europa occidental.
    KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Ruso.
    BIG5 950 Chino tradicional, usado principalmente en Taiwán.
    GB2312 936 Chino simplificado, juego de caracteres estándar nacional.
    BIG5-HKSCS   Big5 con extensiones de Hong Kong, chino tradicional.
    Shift_JIS SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 Japonés
    EUC-JP EUCJP, eucJP-win Japonés
    MacRoman   Juego de caracteres que fue utilizado por Mac OS.
    ''   Un string vacío activa la detección desde la codificación del script (Zend multibyte), default_charset y la actual configuración regional (véase nl_langinfo() y setlocale()), en este orden. No se recomienda.

    Nota: No se reconoce cualquier otro juego de caracteres. Será utilizada en su lugar la codificación por defecto y se emitirá una advertencia.

    Valores devueltos

    Devuelve el string descodificado.

    Historial de cambios

    Versión Descripción
    5.6.0 El valor predeterminado para el parámetro encoding se cambió para que fuera el valor de la opción de configuración default_charset.
    5.4.0 La codificación predeterminada se cambió de ISO-8859-1 a UTF-8.
    5.4.0 Se añadieron las constantes ENT_HTML401, ENT_XML1, ENT_XHTML y ENT_HTML5.

    Ejemplos

    Ejemplo #1 Decodificación de entidades HTML

    <?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
    ?>

    Notas

    Nota:

    Puede que se pregunte por qué trim(html_entity_decode('&nbsp;')); no reduce el string a un string vacío. Esto es porque la entidad '&nbsp;' no es el código ASCII 32 (el cual es eliminado por trim()), sino el código ASCII 160 (0xa0) en la codificación ISO 8859-1.

    Ver también

    add a note add a note

    User Contributed Notes 20 notes

    up
    128
    Martin
    13 years ago
    If you need something that converts &#[0-9]+ entities to UTF-8, this is simple and works:

    <?php
    /* Entity crap. /
    $input = "Fovi&#269;";

    $output = preg_replace_callback("/(&#[0-9]+;)/", function($m) { return mb_convert_encoding($m[1], "UTF-8", "HTML-ENTITIES"); }, $input);

    /* Plain UTF-8. */
    echo $output;
    ?>
    up
    29
    txnull
    9 years ago
    Use the following to decode all entities:
    <?php html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8') ?>

    I've checked these special entities:
    - double quotes (&#34;)
    - single quotes (&#39; and &apos;)
    - non printable chars (e.g. &#13;)
    With other $flags some or all won't be decoded.

    It seems that ENT_XML1 and ENT_XHTML are identical when decoding.
    up
    6
    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
    up
    2
    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;
    }
    up
    -1
    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&#039;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.
    up
    -3
    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).
    up
    -3
    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 &#269;&#x5d0; test&#39;';

        echo     $test . "<br />\n";
        echo     preg_replace_callback('/&#([0-9a-fx]+);/mi', 'replace_num_entity', $test);

    ?>
    up
    -4
    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);
                         // &scaron; => "s" / &#353; => "_"
                         $clean .= ($subst != "#") ? $subst : "_";
                         $clean .= substr($out,$entity_end+1);
                         // und weiter gehts
                         $out = cleanString($clean,$entity_start+1);
                }
            }
        }
        return     $out;
    }
    ?>
    up
    -4
    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));
        }
    }
    ?>
    up
    -3
    Anonymous
    3 years ago
    Why doesn't the html_entity_decode() function convert entities without the last semicolon (like &#x41 or &#65) to characters?

    ---
    <?php
    echo 'like &#x41 or &#65';
    ---

    Browser displays fine:
    ----
    like A or A
    up
    -7
    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('&trade;', chr(153), $subject);
    up
    -8
    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!
    up
    -5
    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);
    }
    ?>
    up
    -11
    florianborn (at) yahoo (dot) de
    19 years ago
    Note that

    <?php

    echo urlencode(html_entity_decode("&nbsp;"));

    ?>

    will output "%A0" instead of "+".
    up
    -9
    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     = '&nbsp;';
    $utf8_encode = utf8_encode(html_entity_decode($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"
    up
    -7
    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.
    up
    -15
    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
    up
    -15
    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;
        }
    ?>
    up
    -13
    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);
    }
    ?>
    up
    -17
    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 &#x20AC; which do not break down into an ASCII number (that's the Euro, by the way).
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