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    html_entity_decode

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

    html_entity_decode — Convert HTML entities to their corresponding characters

    说明

    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.

    参数

    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 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.
    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.

    支持以下字符集：

    支持的字符集列表
    字符集 别名 描述
    ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 西欧，Latin-1
    ISO-8859-5 ISO8859-5 Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
    ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 西欧，Latin-9。增加欧元符号，法语和芬兰语字母在 Latin-1(ISO-8859-1) 中缺失。
    UTF-8   ASCII 兼容的多字节 8 位 Unicode。
    cp866 ibm866, 866 DOS 特有的西里尔编码。本字符集在 4.3.2 版本中得到支持。
    cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows 特有的西里尔编码。本字符集在 4.3.2 版本中得到支持。
    cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Windows 特有的西欧编码。
    KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r 俄语。本字符集在 4.3.2 版本中得到支持。
    BIG5 950 繁体中文，主要用于中国台湾省。
    GB2312 936 简体中文，中国国家标准字符集。
    BIG5-HKSCS   繁体中文，附带香港扩展的 Big5 字符集。
    Shift_JIS SJIS, 932 日语
    EUC-JP EUCJP 日语
    MacRoman   Mac OS 使用的字符串。
    ''   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.

    注意: 其他字符集没有认可。将会使用默认编码并抛出异常。

    返回值

    Returns the decoded string.

    更新日志

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

    示例

    示例 #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
    ?>

    注释

    注意:

    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.

    参见

    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
    13 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);
    }
    ?>
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    -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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