String Functions
PHP Manual

html_entity_decode

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)

html_entity_decodeConvert all HTML entities to their applicable characters

Description

string html_entity_decode ( string $string [, int $quote_style = ENT_COMPAT [, string $charset ]] )

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

Parameters

string

The input string.

quote_style

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:

Available quote_style 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.

charset

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

Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later.

Supported charsets
Charset Aliases Description
ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1
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. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European.
KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
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, 932 Japanese
EUC-JP EUCJP Japanese

Note: Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.

Return Values

Returns the decoded string.

Changelog

Version Description
5.0.0 Support for multi-byte character sets was added.

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 &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)
{
    
// replace numeric entities
    
$string preg_replace('~&#x([0-9a-f]+);~ei''chr(hexdec("\\1"))'$string);
    
$string preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e''chr("\\1")'$string);
    
// replace literal entities
    
$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

?>

Notes

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


String Functions
PHP Manual