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html_entity_decode

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0)

html_entity_decode --  Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters

Description

string html_entity_decode ( string string [, int quote_style [, string charset]])

html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from string.

The optional second quote_style parameter lets you define what will be done with 'single' and "double" quotes. It takes on one of three constants with the default being ENT_COMPAT:

Table 1. Available quote_style 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.

The ISO-8859-1 character set is used as default for the optional third charset. This defines the character set used in conversion.

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 &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now

echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now


// For users prior to PHP 4.3.0 you may do this:
function unhtmlentities ($string)
{
    $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);
    $trans_tbl = array_flip ($trans_tbl);
    return strtr ($string, $trans_tbl);
}

$c = unhtmlentities($a);

echo $c; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now

?>

Note: 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 characterset.

See also htmlentities(), htmlspecialchars(), get_html_translation_table(), htmlspecialchars() and urldecode().

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