How to reverse htmlentities()?

Question

For special characters like áéí, I can call htmlentities():

$mycaption = htmlentities($mycaption, ENT_QUOTES);

To get the corresponding html entities:

áéí

How can I reverse this back to áéí ?

Answer 1

If you use htmlentities() to encode, you can use html_entity_decode() to reverse the process:

html_entity_decode()

Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters.

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

e.g.

$myCaption = 'áéí';

//encode
$myCaptionEncoded = htmlentities($myCaption, ENT_QUOTES);

//reverse (decode)
$myCaptionDecoded = html_entity_decode($myCaptionEncoded);

Answer 2

You want to look at html_entity_decode and worry about which charset you should be using (probably ISO8859-1).

It may also be worth reading this article about character sets etc.

Answer 3

I think you are looking for html_entity_decode.

Answer 4

html_entity_decode(). This can be found at the very beginning of the documentation for htmlentities

Answer 5

string html_entity_decode ( string $string [, int $quote_style = ENT_COMPAT [, string $charset = 'UTF-8' ]] )