Example
Convert some characters to HTML entities:
html
<?php
$str = '<a href="https://www.example.com">Go to
example.com</a>';
echo htmlentities($str);
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
html
<a href="https://www.example.com">Go to example.com</a>
The browser output of the code above will be:
html
<a href="https://www.example.com">Go to example.com</a>
Definition and Usage
The htmlentities() function converts characters to HTML entities.
Tip: To convert HTML entities back to characters, use the html_entity_decode() function.
Tip: Use the get_html_translation_table() function to return the translation table used by htmlentities().
Syntax
text
htmlentities(string,flags,encoding,double_encode)
Parameter Values
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| string | Required. Specifies the string to convert |
| flags | Optional. Specifies how to handle quotes, invalid encoding and the used document type. The available quote styles are: ENT_COMPAT - Encodes only double quotes ENT_QUOTES - Default. Encodes double and single quotes ENT_NOQUOTES - Does not encode any quotes Invalid encoding: ENT_IGNORE - Ignores invalid encoding instead of having the function return an empty string. Should be avoided, as it may have security implications. ENT_SUBSTITUTE - Replaces invalid encoding for a specified character set with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; instead of returning an empty string. ENT_DISALLOWED - Replaces code points that are invalid in the specified doctype with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; Additional flags for specifying the used doctype: ENT_HTML401 - Default. Handle code as HTML 4.01 ENT_HTML5 - Handle code as HTML 5 ENT_XML1 - Handle code as XML 1 ENT_XHTML - Handle code as XHTML |
| encoding | Optional. A string that specifies which character-set to use. Allowed values are: UTF-8 - Default. ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode ISO-8859-1 - Western European ISO-8859-15 - Western European (adds the Euro sign + French and Finnish letters missing in ISO-8859-1) cp866 - DOS-specific Cyrillic charset cp1251 - Windows-specific Cyrillic charset cp1252 - Windows specific charset for Western European KOI8-R - Russian BIG5 - Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan GB2312 - Simplified Chinese, national standard character set BIG5-HKSCS - Big5 with Hong Kong extensions Shift_JIS - Japanese EUC-JP - Japanese MacRoman - Character-set that was used by Mac OS |
| double_encode | Optional. A boolean value that specifies whether to encode existing html entities or not. TRUE - Default. Will convert everything FALSE - Will not encode existing html entities |
Technical Details
| Return Value: | Returns the encoded string. However, if the string parameter contains invalid encoding, it will return an empty string, unless either the ENT_IGNORE or ENT_SUBSTITUTE flags are set |
|---|---|
| PHP Version: | 4+ |
| Changelog: | PHP 8.0 - encoding is nullable now |
More Examples
Example
Convert some characters to HTML entities:
html
<?php
$str = "Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_COMPAT); // Will only convert double quotes
echo "<br>";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES); // Converts double and single quotes
echo "<br>";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_NOQUOTES); // Does not convert any quotes
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
html
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'<br>
Albert Einstein said:
'E=MC²'<br>
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
The browser output of the code above will be:
html
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert
Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Example
Convert some characters to HTML entities using the Western European character-set:
html
<?php
$str = "My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.";
echo htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"); // Will only convert double quotes (not single quotes), and uses the character-set Western European
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.
</body>
</html>
The browser output of the code above will be:
html
My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.