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 [, 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