(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)
html_entity_decode -- Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters
html_entity_decode() is the opposite of
htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities
to their applicable characters from string.
stringThe 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:
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.
Table 2. 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.
Note: You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode(' ')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the ' ' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 characterset.