<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters</title>
</head>
<body><div class="manualnavbar" style="text-align: center;">
<div class="prev" style="text-align: left; float: left;"><a href="function.hex2bin.html">hex2bin</a></div>
<div class="next" style="text-align: right; float: right;"><a href="function.htmlentities.html">htmlentities</a></div>
<div class="up"><a href="ref.strings.html">String Functions</a></div>
<div class="home"><a href="index.html">PHP Manual</a></div>
</div><hr /><div id="function.html-entity-decode" class="refentry">
<div class="refnamediv">
<h1 class="refname">html_entity_decode</h1>
<p class="verinfo">(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)</p><p class="refpurpose"><span class="refname">html_entity_decode</span> — <span class="dc-title">Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters</span></p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 description" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-description">
<h3 class="title">Description</h3>
<div class="methodsynopsis dc-description">
<span class="type">string</span> <span class="methodname"><strong>html_entity_decode</strong></span>
( <span class="methodparam"><span class="type">string</span> <code class="parameter">$string</code></span>
[, <span class="methodparam"><span class="type">int</span> <code class="parameter">$flags</code><span class="initializer"> = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401</span></span>
[, <span class="methodparam"><span class="type">string</span> <code class="parameter">$encoding</code><span class="initializer"> = 'UTF-8'</span></span>
]] )</div>
<p class="para rdfs-comment">
<span class="function"><strong>html_entity_decode()</strong></span> is the opposite of
<span class="function"><a href="function.htmlentities.html" class="function">htmlentities()</a></span> in that it converts all HTML entities
in the <em><code class="parameter">string</code></em> to their applicable characters.
</p>
<p class="para">
More precisely, this function decodes all the entities (including all numeric
entities) that a) are necessarily valid for the chosen document type — i.e.,
for XML, this function does not decode named entities that might be defined
in some DTD — and b) whose character or characters are in the coded character
set associated with the chosen encoding and are permitted in the chosen
document type. All other entities are left as is.
</p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 parameters" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-parameters">
<h3 class="title">Parameters</h3>
<p class="para">
<dl>
<dt>
<span class="term"><em><code class="parameter">string</code></em></span>
<dd>
<p class="para">
The input string.
</p>
</dd>
</dt>
<dt>
<span class="term"><em><code class="parameter">flags</code></em></span>
<dd>
<p class="para">
A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes and
which document type to use. The default is <em>ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401</em>.
<table class="doctable table">
<caption><strong>Available <em><code class="parameter">flags</code></em> constants</strong></caption>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Constant Name</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody class="tbody">
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_COMPAT</code></strong></td>
<td>Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_QUOTES</code></strong></td>
<td>Will convert both double and single quotes.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_NOQUOTES</code></strong></td>
<td>Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_HTML401</code></strong></td>
<td>
Handle code as HTML 4.01.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_XML1</code></strong></td>
<td>
Handle code as XML 1.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_XHTML</code></strong></td>
<td>
Handle code as XHTML.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong><code>ENT_HTML5</code></strong></td>
<td>
Handle code as HTML 5.
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</p>
</dd>
</dt>
<dt>
<span class="term"><em><code class="parameter">encoding</code></em></span>
<dd>
<p class="para">
Encoding to use.
If omitted, the default value for this argument is ISO-8859-1 in
versions of PHP prior to 5.4.0, and UTF-8 from PHP 5.4.0 onwards.
</p>
<p class="para">
The following character sets are supported:
<table class="doctable table">
<caption><strong>Supported charsets</strong></caption>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Charset</th>
<th>Aliases</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody class="tbody">
<tr>
<td>ISO-8859-1</td>
<td>ISO8859-1</td>
<td>
Western European, Latin-1.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ISO-8859-5</td>
<td>ISO8859-5</td>
<td>
Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ISO-8859-15</td>
<td>ISO8859-15</td>
<td>
Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish
letters missing in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>UTF-8</td>
<td class="empty"> </td>
<td>
ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>cp866</td>
<td>ibm866, 866</td>
<td>
DOS-specific Cyrillic charset.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>cp1251</td>
<td>Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251</td>
<td>
Windows-specific Cyrillic charset.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>cp1252</td>
<td>Windows-1252, 1252</td>
<td>
Windows specific charset for Western European.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>KOI8-R</td>
<td>koi8-ru, koi8r</td>
<td>
Russian.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>BIG5</td>
<td>950</td>
<td>
Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>GB2312</td>
<td>936</td>
<td>
Simplified Chinese, national standard character set.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>BIG5-HKSCS</td>
<td class="empty"> </td>
<td>
Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Shift_JIS</td>
<td>SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932</td>
<td>
Japanese
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EUC-JP</td>
<td>EUCJP, eucJP-win</td>
<td>
Japanese
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>MacRoman</td>
<td class="empty"> </td>
<td>
Charset that was used by Mac OS.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><em>''</em></td>
<td class="empty"> </td>
<td>
An empty string activates detection from script encoding (Zend multibyte),
<a href="ini.core.html#ini.default-charset" class="link">default_charset</a> and current
locale (see <span class="function"><a href="function.nl-langinfo.html" class="function">nl_langinfo()</a></span> and
<span class="function"><a href="function.setlocale.html" class="function">setlocale()</a></span>), in this order. Not recommended.
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<blockquote class="note"><p><strong class="note">Note</strong>:
<span class="simpara">
Any other character sets are not recognized. The default encoding will be
used instead and a warning will be emitted.
</span>
</p></blockquote>
</p>
</dd>
</dt>
</dl>
</p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 returnvalues" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-returnvalues">
<h3 class="title">Return Values</h3>
<p class="para">
Returns the decoded string.
</p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 changelog" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-changelog">
<h3 class="title">Changelog</h3>
<p class="para">
<table class="doctable informaltable">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Version</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody class="tbody">
<tr>
<td>5.4.0</td>
<td>
Default encoding changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5.4.0</td>
<td>
The constants <strong><code>ENT_HTML401</code></strong>, <strong><code>ENT_XML1</code></strong>,
<strong><code>ENT_XHTML</code></strong> and <strong><code>ENT_HTML5</code></strong> were added.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5.0.0</td>
<td>
Support for multi-byte encodings was added.
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 examples" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-examples">
<h3 class="title">Examples</h3>
<p class="para">
<div class="example" id="example-4835">
<p><strong>Example #1 Decoding HTML entities</strong></p>
<div class="example-contents">
<div class="phpcode"><code><span style="color: #000000">
<span style="color: #0000BB"><?php<br />$orig </span><span style="color: #007700">= </span><span style="color: #DD0000">"I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now"</span><span style="color: #007700">;<br /><br /></span><span style="color: #0000BB">$a </span><span style="color: #007700">= </span><span style="color: #0000BB">htmlentities</span><span style="color: #007700">(</span><span style="color: #0000BB">$orig</span><span style="color: #007700">);<br /><br /></span><span style="color: #0000BB">$b </span><span style="color: #007700">= </span><span style="color: #0000BB">html_entity_decode</span><span style="color: #007700">(</span><span style="color: #0000BB">$a</span><span style="color: #007700">);<br /><br />echo </span><span style="color: #0000BB">$a</span><span style="color: #007700">; </span><span style="color: #FF8000">// I'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now<br /><br /></span><span style="color: #007700">echo </span><span style="color: #0000BB">$b</span><span style="color: #007700">; </span><span style="color: #FF8000">// I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now<br /></span><span style="color: #0000BB">?></span>
</span>
</code></div>
</div>
</div>
</p>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 notes" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-notes">
<h3 class="title">Notes</h3>
<blockquote class="note"><p><strong class="note">Note</strong>:
<p class="para">
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
<span class="function"><a href="function.trim.html" class="function">trim()</a></span>) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO
8859-1 encoding.
</p>
</p></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="refsect1 seealso" id="refsect1-function.html-entity-decode-seealso">
<h3 class="title">See Also</h3>
<p class="para">
<ul class="simplelist">
<li class="member"> <span class="function"><a href="function.htmlentities.html" class="function" rel="rdfs-seeAlso">htmlentities()</a> - Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities</span></li>
<li class="member"> <span class="function"><a href="function.htmlspecialchars.html" class="function" rel="rdfs-seeAlso">htmlspecialchars()</a> - Convert special characters to HTML entities</span></li>
<li class="member"> <span class="function"><a href="function.get-html-translation-table.html" class="function" rel="rdfs-seeAlso">get_html_translation_table()</a> - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities</span></li>
<li class="member"> <span class="function"><a href="function.urldecode.html" class="function" rel="rdfs-seeAlso">urldecode()</a> - Decodes URL-encoded string</span></li>
</ul>
</p>
</div>
</div><hr /><div class="manualnavbar" style="text-align: center;">
<div class="prev" style="text-align: left; float: left;"><a href="function.hex2bin.html">hex2bin</a></div>
<div class="next" style="text-align: right; float: right;"><a href="function.htmlentities.html">htmlentities</a></div>
<div class="up"><a href="ref.strings.html">String Functions</a></div>
<div class="home"><a href="index.html">PHP Manual</a></div>
</div></body></html>
