In this article, you will learn how to convert HTML element into characters. The PHP html_entity_decode() function convert HTML entity ti characters. Note: This function is the opposite of htmlentities() function.
What is the syntax of the html_entity_decode() function?
html_entity_decode(string,flags,character-set)| Parameters | Details |
|---|---|
| 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 quotesENT_QUOTES – Decodes double and single quotesENT_NOQUOTES – Does not decode any quotesAdditional flags for specifying the used doctype:ENT_HTML401 – Default. Handle code as HTML 4.01ENT_HTML5 – Handle code as HTML 5ENT_XML1 – Handle code as XML 1ENT_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 UnicodeISO-8859-1 – Western EuropeanISO-8859-15 – Western European (adds the Euro sign + French and Finnish letters missing in ISO-8859-1)cp866 – DOS-specific Cyrillic charsetcp1251 – Windows-specific Cyrillic charsetcp1252 – Windows specific charset for Western EuropeanKOI8-R – RussianBIG5 – Traditional Chinese, mainly used in TaiwanGB2312 – Simplified Chinese, national standard character setBIG5-HKSCS – Big5 with Hong Kong extensionsShift_JIS – JapaneseEUC-JP – JapaneseMacRoman – Character-set that was used by Mac OSNote: 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. |
examples of the html_entity_decode() function
Example 1. In this example, we convert the HTML to corresponding characters.
<?php
$string = '<a href="https://www.php.org">php.org</a>';
echo html_entity_decode($string);
?>The above example produce output in the browser = "php.org"The HTML produce the output of the above example: <a href="https://www.php.org">w3schools.com</a>Example 2. In the following example, we convert the HTML elements into characters.
<?php
$str = "According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'";
// Only double qoutes are converted
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_COMPAT);
// Single and double quotes are converted
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES);
// Quotes are not converted
echo html_entity_decode($str, ENT_NOQUOTES);
?>The above example produce output in HTML
According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'<br>
According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'<br>
According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'
According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'
According to some great scientist: 'E=MC²'
