html_entity_decode

Description

html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts HTML entities in the string to their corresponding characters.

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.

Parameters

string

The input string.

flags

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 ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

Constant Name	Description
ENT_COMPAT	Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.
ENT_QUOTES	Will convert both double and single quotes.
ENT_NOQUOTES	Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted.
ENT_SUBSTITUTE	Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
ENT_HTML401	Handle code as HTML 4.01.
ENT_XML1	Handle code as XML 1.
ENT_XHTML	Handle code as XHTML.
ENT_HTML5	Handle code as HTML 5.

encoding

Encoding Charsets

Return Values

Returns the decoded string.

Changelog

Examples

Decoding HTML entities

<?php
$orig = "I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now";

$a = htmlentities($orig);

$b = html_entity_decode($a);

echo $a, PHP_EOL; // I'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now

echo $b, PHP_EOL; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
?>

Notes

See Also

• htmlentities()
• htmlspecialchars()
• get_html_translation_table()
• urldecode()