PHP html_entity_decode() Function
Example
Convert HTML entities to characters:
<?php
$str = '<a href="https://www.w3schools.com">w3schools.com</a>';
echo html_entity_decode($str);
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
<a href="https://www.w3schools.com">Go to w3schools.com</a>
The browser output of the code above will be:
Definition and Usage
The html_entity_decode() function converts HTML entities to characters.
The html_entity_decode() function is the opposite of htmlentities().
Syntax
html_entity_decode(string,flags,character-set)
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| string | Required. Specifies the string to decode |
| flags | Optional. Specifies how to handle quotes and which document type to use. The available quote styles are:
Additional flags for specifying the used doctype:
|
| character-set | Optional. A string that specifies which character-set to use. Allowed values are:
Note: Unrecognized character-sets will be ignored and replaced by ISO-8859-1 in versions prior to PHP 5.4. As of PHP 5.4, it will be ignored an replaced by UTF-8. |
Technical Details
| Return Value: | Returns the converted string |
|---|---|
| PHP Version: | 4.3.0+ |
| Changelog: | The default value for the character-set parameter was changed to
UTF-8 in PHP 5 The additional flags for specifying the used doctype; ENT_HTML401, ENT_HTML5, ENT_XML1 and ENT_XHTML were added in PHP 5.4 Support for multi-byte encodings was added in PHP 5.0 |
More Examples
Example 1
Convert some HTML entities to characters:
<?php
$str = "Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'";
echo
html_entity_decode($str, ENT_COMPAT); // Will only convert double quotes
echo "<br>";
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES); // Converts double
and single quotes
echo "<br>";
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_NOQUOTES); // Does not
convert any quotes
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
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:
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Albert
Einstein said: 'E=MC²'
Example 2
Convert some HTML entities to characters, using the Western European character-set:
<?php
$str = "My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.";
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
?>
The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):
My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.
The browser output of the code above will be:
My name is Øyvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.
❮ PHP String Reference
