PHP htmlentities() Function

The htmlentities() function converts characters to HTML entities.

string htmlentities ( string $string [, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401 [, string $encoding = ini_get("default_charset") [, bool $double_encode = TRUE ]]] )

Example -

Example #1 A htmlentities() example

Example #2 Usage of ENT_IGNORE

ParameterDescription
stringRequired. Specifies the string to convert
flagsOptional. Specifies how to handle quotes, invalid encoding and the used document type.
The available quote styles are:
  • ENT_COMPAT - Default. Encodes only double quotes
  • ENT_QUOTES - Encodes double and single quotes
  • ENT_NOQUOTES - Does not encode any quotes
    • Invalid encoding:
  • ENT_IGNORE - Ignores invalid encoding instead of having the function return an empty string. Should be avoided, as it may have security implications.
    • ENT_SUBSTITUTE - Replaces invalid encoding for a specified character set with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; instead of returning an empty string.
    ENT_DISALLOWED - Replaces code points that are invalid in the specified doctype with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD;
    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-setOptional. 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/a>
  • cp1251 - Windows-specific Cyrillic charset/a>
  • 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

    • The absolute value of number. If the argument number is of type float, the return type is also float, otherwise it is integer (as float usually has a bigger value range than integer).