html_entity_decode() function in PHP

The html_entity_decode() is used to convert HTML entities to their application characters

Syntax

html_entity_decode(str, flags, character-set)

Parameters

• str − The string to decode

• flags − Specifies how to handle quotes.

• The following are the quote styles −

  • 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 − A string that specifies which character-set to use.

• The following are the possible values −

  • 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

Return

The html_entity_decode() function returns the converted string.

The following is an example −

Example

<?php
$orig = "We've all the <b>books<b>!";
$one = htmlentities($orig);
$two = html_entity_decode($one);
echo $one;
echo $two;
?>

The following is the output −

Output

We've all the <b>books</b>!We've all the books!