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PHP html_entity_decode() Function

< PHP String Reference

Example

Convert HTML entities to characters:

<?php
$str = "&lt;&copy; W3S&ccedil;h&deg;&deg;&brvbar;&sect;&gt;";
echo html_entity_decode($str);
?>

The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<© W3School>
</body>
</html>

The browser output of the code above will be:

<© W3School>

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:

  • ENT_COMPAT - Default. Decodes only double quotes
  • ENT_QUOTES - Decodes double and single quotes
  • ENT_NOQUOTES - Does not decode any quotes

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
character-set 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

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
$str = "Jane &amp; &#039;Tarzan&#039;";
echo html_entity_decode($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):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
Jane & &#039;Tarzan&#039;<br>
Jane & 'Tarzan'<br>
Jane & &#039;Tarzan&#039;
</body>
</html>

The browser output of the code above will be:

Jane & 'Tarzan'
Jane & 'Tarzan'
Jane & 'Tarzan'


Example 2

Convert some HTML entities to characters, using the Western European character-set:

<?php
$str = "My name is &Oslash;yvind &Aring;sane. I&#039;m Norwegian.";
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES, "ISO-8859-1");
?>

The HTML output of the code above will be (View Source):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
My name is yvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.
</body>
</html>

The browser output of the code above will be:

My name is yvind Åsane. I'm Norwegian.

< PHP String Reference