convert unicode to html entities hex

Question

How to convert a Unicode string to HTML entities? (HEX not decimal)

For example, convert Français to Français.

Answer 1

Firstly, when I faced this problem recently, I solved it by making sure my code-files, DB connection, and DB tables were all UTF-8 Then, simply echoing the text works. If you must escape the output from the DB use htmlspecialchars() and not htmlentities() so that the UTF-8 symbols are left alone and not attempted to be escaped.

Would like to document an alternative solution because it solved a similar problem for me. I was using PHP's utf8_encode() to escape 'special' characters.

I wanted to convert them into HTML entities for display, I wrote this code because I wanted to avoid iconv or such functions as far as possible since not all environments necessarily have them (do correct me if it is not so!)

$foo = 'This is my test string \u03b50';
echo unicode2html($foo);

function unicode2html($string) {
    return preg_replace('/\\\\u([0-9a-z]{4})/', '&#x$1;', $string);
}

Hope this helps somebody in need :-)