(PHP 4, PHP 5)
htmlentities — Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
$string
[, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401
[, string $encoding = ini_get("default_charset")
[, bool $double_encode = true
]]] )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.
If you want to decode instead (the reverse) you can use html_entity_decode().
stringThe input string.
flagsA 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_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401.
| 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_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. |
encodingAn optional argument defining the encoding used when converting characters.
If omitted, the default value of the encoding varies
depending on the PHP version in use. In PHP 5.6 and later, the
default_charset configuration
option is used as the default value. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 will use
UTF-8 as the default. Earlier versions of PHP use
ISO-8859-1.
Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to specify the correct value for your code if you are using PHP 5.5 or earlier, or if your default_charset configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.
The following character sets are supported:
| 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.
double_encode
When double_encode is turned off PHP will not
encode existing html entities. The default is to convert everything.
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.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 5.6.0 |
The default value for the encoding parameter was
changed to be the value of the
default_charset configuration
option.
|
| 5.4.0 |
The default value for the encoding parameter was
changed to UTF-8.
|
| 5.4.0 |
The constants ENT_SUBSTITUTE, ENT_DISALLOWED,
ENT_HTML401, ENT_XML1,
ENT_XHTML and ENT_HTML5 were added.
|
| 5.3.0 |
The constant ENT_IGNORE was added.
|
| 5.2.3 |
The double_encode parameter was added.
|
Example #1 A htmlentities() example
<?php
$str = "A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>";
// Outputs: A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>
echo htmlentities($str);
// Outputs: A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>
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");
?>