htmlentities

add a note User Contributed Notes

chuck at broker[remove]bin dot com
01-Nov-2006 09:33


/*

replaces everything but

alphanumeric

tab

newline

carriage return

*/

function allhtmlentities($string,$decode_first=true) {

    // this is to ensure that any entities already coded are not "messed up"

    if($decode_first) $string = html_entity_decode($string);

    // "encode"

    return preg_replace(

'/([^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7F]|[\x21-\x2F]|[\x3A-\x40]|[\x5B-\x60])/e'

           , '"&#".ord("$0").";"', $string);

}

kevin at metalaxe dot com
16-Oct-2006 05:39


for danster3k at hotmail dot com, this will replace the ampersand returned for your &pound; with &amp;pound; and display the entity int he browser:

<?php

 if (isset($_POST['action']) && $_POST['action'] == 'submitted') {

   $output =($_POST['myInput']);

   print str_replace( '&', '&amp;', htmlentities($output,ENT_QUOTES) ); 



 }

 else {

   ?>

      <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">

       <p>Enter e-mail Subject here: <input type="string" name="myInput"> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Convert"></p>

     <input type="hidden" name="action" value="submitted" />

     </form>

   <?php

 }

?>

danster3k at hotmail dot com
10-Oct-2006 01:27


<?php

 if (isset($_POST['action']) && $_POST['action'] == 'submitted') {

   $output =($_POST['myInput']);

   print htmlentities($output,ENT_QUOTES);  



 } 

 else {

   ?>

      <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">

        <p>Enter e-mail Subject here: <input type="string" name="myInput"> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Convert"></p>

      <input type="hidden" name="action" value="submitted" />

      </form>

   <?php

 }

?> 



using this code i simply want the user to input for example "100" and then hit submit and this will output "&pound;100" on the screen .. but for some reason it outputs 100 on the browser.. but in the view source it has &pound;100 .. any idea how i can get it to display &pound;100 on the page??

eric.wallet at yahoo.fr
26-Sep-2006 07:57


function htmlnumericentities($str){

  return preg_replace('/[^!-%\x27-;=?-~ ]/e', '"&#".ord("$0").chr(59)', $str);

}



function numericentitieshtml($str){

  return utf8_encode(preg_replace('/&#(\d+);/e', 'chr(str_replace(";","",str_replace("&#","","$0")))', $str));

}



echo (htmlnumericentities ("Ceci est un test : &  $   <"));

echo ("<br/>\n");

echo (numericentitieshtml (htmlnumericentities ("Ceci est un test : &  $   <")));



Output is :

Ceci est un test : &#38; &#233; $ &#224; &#231; &#60;<br/>

Ceci est un test : &  $   <



First method convert characters to decimal values.

Second will reverse the problem !!!

lorenzo masetti at libero it
08-Aug-2006 11:44


i think I found a bug in  makeSafeEntities procedure. I don't know why but if the string has a special charachter as the last one (e.g. 'libert') the result will be truncated ('libert')

I solved by adding and  taking a way a blank at the  end  of the string ,  it is not the most elegant solution but it works

This is the part that I changed in the original code that is at http://www.prolifique.com/entities.php.txt



<?php

function makeSafeEntities($str, $convertTags = 0, $encoding = "") {

 if (is_array($arrOutput = $str)) {

   foreach (array_keys($arrOutput) as $key)

     $arrOutput[$key] = makeSafeEntities($arrOutput[$key],$encoding);

   return $arrOutput;

   }

 else if (!empty($str)) {

     $str .= " ";

   $str = makeUTF8($str,$encoding);

   $str = mb_convert_encoding($str,"HTML-ENTITIES","UTF-8");

   $str = makeAmpersandEntities($str);

   if ($convertTags)

     $str = makeTagEntities($str);

   $str = correctIllegalEntities($str);

   return substr($str, 0, strlen($str)-1);

   }

 } 

?>

daviscabral[arroba]gmail[ponto]com
29-Jul-2006 03:52


unhtmlentities for all entities:



<?php



function unhtmlentities ($string) {

   $trans_tbl1 = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);

   foreach ( $trans_tbl1 as $ascii => $htmlentitie ) {

        $trans_tbl2[$ascii] = '&#'.ord($ascii).';';

   }

   $trans_tbl1 = array_flip ($trans_tbl1);

   $trans_tbl2 = array_flip ($trans_tbl2);

   return strtr (strtr ($string, $trans_tbl1), $trans_tbl2);

}



?>

info at pirandot dot de
22-Jul-2006 10:14


Unfortunately, there are differences between what is shown in the preview window and what is shown on the web site; thus, the extreme number of backslashes in my former note.



The corrected note:



The data returned by a text input field is ready to be used in a data base query when enclosed in single quotes, e.g.

<?php

   mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM Article WHERE id = '$data'");

?>

But you will get problems when writing back this data into the input field's value,

<?php

   echo "<input name='data' type='text' value='$data'>";

?>

because hmtl codes would be interpreted and escape sequences would cause strange output.



The following function may help:

<?php

function deescape ($s, $charset='UTF-8')

{

   //  don't interpret html codes and don't convert quotes

   $s  =  htmlentities ($s, ENT_NOQUOTES, $charset);



   //  delete the inserted backslashes except those for protecting single quotes

   $s  =  preg_replace ("/\\\\([^'])/e", '"&#" . ord("$1") . ";"', $s);



   //  delete the backslashes inserted for protecting single quotes

   $s  =  str_replace ("\\'", "&#" . ord ("'") . ";", $s);



   return  $s;

}

?>

Try some input like:  a'b"c\d\'e\"f\\g&x#27;h  to test ...

info at pirandot dot de
22-Jul-2006 09:00


The data returned by a text input field is ready to be used in a data base query when enclosed in single quotes, e.g.

<?php

    mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM Article WHERE id = '$data'");

?>

But you will get problems when writing back this data into the input field's value,

<?php

    echo "<input type='text' value='$data'>";

?>

because hmtl codes would be interpreted and escape sequences would cause strange output.



The following function may help:

<?php

function deescape ($s, $charset='UTF-8')

{

    //  don't interpret html codes and don't convert quotes

    $s  =  htmlentities ($s, ENT_NOQUOTES, $charset);



    //  delete the inserted backslashes except those for protecting single quotes

    $s  =  preg_replace ("/\\\\\\\\([^'])/e", '"&#" . ord("$1") . ";"', $s);



    //  delete the backslashes inserted for protecting single quotes

    $s  =  str_replace ("\\\\'", "&#" . ord ("'") . ";", $s);



    return  $s;

}

?>

Try some input like:  a'b"c\\d\\'e\\"f\\\\g&x#27;h  to test ...

soapergem at gmail dot com
11-May-2006 02:14


A quick revision to my last comment. For some reason, leaving the control characters in the safe range seemed to screw things up. So instead, using this function will do what everybody else here is trying to do, but it will do so in a single line:



<?php

$text = preg_replace('/[^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7F]/e', '"&#".ord($0).";"', $text);

?>

cameron at prolifique dot com
11-May-2006 02:01


I've been asked why I assembled such intricate functions to convert to entities when I could use a very simple solution (like the one offered by soapergem below). The biggest reason is that the PHP htmlentities function and most of the other solutions listed below go haywire on multi-byte strings.



In addition, the entire range of numbered entities from &#129; through &#159; are invalid characters, and should not be used (as noted by mail at britlinks dot com below). Most htmlentity functions also do not convert ampersands or pointy brackets (<>) to entities. The ones that do often reconvert existing entities (&amp; becomes &amp;amp;).

cameron at prolifique dot com
06-May-2006 08:02


I've been dissatisfied with all the solutions I've yet seen for converting text into html entities, which all seem to have some drawback or another. So I wrote my own, borrowing heavily from other code posted on this site.



http://www.prolifique.com/entities.php.txt



makeSafeEntities() should take any text, convert it from the specified charset into UTF-8, then replace all inappropriate characters with appropriate (and legal) character entities, returning generic ISO-8859 HTML text. Should NOT reconvert any entities already in the text.



makeAllEntities() does the same, but converts the entire string to entities. Useful for obscuring email addresses (in a lame but nonetheless somewhat effective way).



Suggestions for improvement welcome!

soapergem at gmail dot com
30-Apr-2006 02:53


Here's another version of that "allhtmlentities" function that an anonymous user posted in the last comment, only this one would be significantly more efficient. Again, this would convert anything that has an ASCII value higher than 127.



<?php

function allhtmlentities($string)

{

    return preg_replace('/[^\x00-\x7F]/e', '"&#".ord("$0").";"', $string);

}

?>

anonymous
27-Apr-2006 03:38


This function will encode anything that is non Standard ASCII (that is, that is above #127 in the ascii table)



// allhtmlentities : mainly based on "chars_encode()"  by Tim Burgan <timburgan@gmail.com> [http://www.php.net/htmlentities]

function allhtmlentities($string) {

    if ( strlen($string) == 0 ) 

        return $string;

    $result = '';

    $string = htmlentities($string, HTML_ENTITIES);

    $string = preg_split("//", $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

    $ord = 0;

    for ( $i = 0; $i < count($string); $i++ ) {

        $ord = ord($string[$i]);

        if ( $ord > 127 ) {

            $string[$i] = '&#' . $ord . ';';

        }

    }

    return implode('',$string);

}

eion at bigfoot dot com
21-Feb-2006 08:54


many people below talk about using 

<?php

    mb_convert_encode($s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8');

?>

to convert non-ascii code into html-readable stuff.  Due to my webserver being out of my control, I was unable to set the database character set, and whenever PHP made a copy of my $s variable that it had pulled out of the database, it would convert it to nasty latin1 automatically and not leave it in it's beautiful UTF-8 glory.



So [insert korean characters here] turned into ?????.



I found myself needing to pass by reference (which of course is deprecated/nonexistent in recent versions of PHP)

so instead of

<?php

    mb_convert_encode(&$s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8');

?>

which worked perfectly until I upgraded, so I had to use

<?php

    call_user_func_array('mb_convert_encoding', array(&$s,'HTML-ENTITIES','UTF-8'));

?>



Hope it helps someone else out

timburgan at gmail dot com
02-Feb-2006 10:39


chars_encode() will, by default, convert ALL non-alpha-numeric and non-space characters in a string to it's ASCII HTML character code (i.e. + to &#43;).



chars_decode() will decode a string encoded by chars_encode().



<?php



/**

 * Encode each char in a string to its HTML ASCII code.

 * Characters encoded by this function can be decoded

 * by chars_decode().

 *

 * This function will work with PHP >= 3.0.9, 4, 5.

 * 

 * @author     Tim Burgan <timburgan@gmail.com>

 * @version    1.0.0

 * @link       http://timburgan.com/

 * @link       http://php.net/manual/function.htmlentities.php

 * @param      string   $string    String to encode

 * @param      bool     $encodeAll Optional. Default is false. If true all chars are encoded, if false, only non-alpha-numeric and non-space chars are encoded.

 * @return     string   Returns a string of encoded chars

 */

function chars_encode($string, $encodeAll = false)

{

   // declare variables

   $chars = array();

   $ent = null;

   

   // split string into array

   $chars = preg_split("//", $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

   

   // encode each character

   for ( $i = 0; $i < count($chars); $i++ )

   {

      if ( preg_match("/^(\w| )$/",$chars[$i]) && $encodeAll == false )

         $ent[$i] = $chars[$i];

      else

         $ent[$i] = "&#" . ord($chars[$i]) . ";";

   }

   

   if ( sizeof($ent) < 1)

      return "";

   

   return implode("",$ent);

}



/**

 * Decode each char in a string from its HTML ASCII code.

 * Characters denoded by this function were encoded

 * by chars_encode().

 *

 * This function will work with PHP >= 3.0.9, 4, 5.

 *

 * @author      Tim Burgan <timburgan@gmail.com>

 * @version     1.0.0

 * @link        http://timburgan.com/

 * @link        http://php.net/manual/function.html-entity-decode.php

 * @param       string   $string    String to decode

 * @return      string   Returns a string of decoded chars

 */

function chars_decode($string)

{

   // declare variables

   $tok = 0;

   $cur = 0;

   $chars = null;

   

   // move through the string until the end is reached

   while ( $cur < strlen($string) )

   {

      // find the next token

      $tok = strpos($string, "&#", $cur);

      

      // if no more tokens exist, move pointer to end of string

      if ( $tok === false )

         $tok = strlen($string);

      

      // if the current char is alpha-numeric or a space

      if ( preg_match("/^(\w| )$/",substr($string, $cur, 1)) )

      {

         $chars .= substr($string, $cur, $tok - $cur);

      }

      // the current char must be the start of a token

      else

      {

         $cur += 2;

         $tok = strpos($string, ';', $cur);

         $chars .= chr(substr($string, $cur, $tok - $cur));

         $tok++;

      }

      

      // move the current pointer to the next token

      $cur = $tok;

   }

   

   return $chars;

}



/* Example usage

***********************************************/



$string = '<a href="http://timburgan.com" rel="external" title="Go to timburgan.com">Tim Burgan</a>';



$encoded = chars_encode($string);

$decoded = chars_decode($encoded);



echo <<<HEREDOCS



<h4>Original String Output</h4>

{$string}



<hr/>



<h4>Encoded String Output</h4>

{$encoded}



<hr/>



<h4>Decoded String Output</h4>

{$decoded}



HEREDOCS;



?>

Bartek
01-Feb-2006 06:06


I use this function to convert imput from MS Word into html  (ascii) compatible output. I hope it would work also for you.



I have enabled magic_quotes on my server so maybe you won't need stripslashes and addslashes.

I've also noticed that Opera 8.51 browses behaves somehow different from IE 6 and Firefox 1.5. I haven't check this functions with other browsers.



<?php

function convert_word_to_ascii($string) 

{

    $string = stripslashes($string);

    

    if ( stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Opera") )

    $search = array('&#8216;',

                chr(96),

                '&#8217;', 

                '&#8222;', 

                '&#8221;',

                '&#8220;',

                '&#8230;',

                '&#8211;');

                            

    if ( stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Firefox") || stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "MSIE") )

    $search = array(chr(145),

                chr(146), 

                chr(96),

                chr(132),

                chr(147),

                chr(148),

                chr(133),

                chr(150)); 

                            

    $replace = array(    "'",

                "'",

                "'",

                '"',

                '"',

                '"',

                '...',

                '-'); 



    $new_string = str_replace($search, $replace, $string);

    return addslashes($new_string);

};

?>

24-Jan-2006 09:20


Please, don't use htmlentities to avoid XSS! Htmlspecialchars is enough!



If you don't specify the encoding, Latin1 will be used, so there is a problem if someone wants to use your software in a non-English environment.

mailing at jcn50 dot com
21-Jan-2006 02:25


Convert any language (Japanese, French, Chinese, Russian, etc...) to unicode HTML entities like &#XXXX;

In one line!



$new=mb_convert_encoding($s,"HTML-ENTITIES","auto");



where $s is your string (may be a FORM submitted one).



Enjoy~

edo at edwaa dot com
18-Nov-2005 12:48


A version of the xml entities function below. This one replaces the "prime" character () with which I had difficulties.



// XML Entity Mandatory Escape Characters

function xmlentities($string) {

   return str_replace ( array ( '&', '"', "'", '<', '>', '' ), array ( '&amp;' , '&quot;', '&apos;' , '&lt;' , '&gt;', '&apos;' ), $string );

}

info at bleed dot ws
15-Oct-2005 01:42


here the centralized version of htmlentities() for multibyte.



<?php

function mb_htmlentities($string)

{

    $string = htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, mb_internal_encoding());

    return $string;

} 



?>

fanfatal at fanfatal dot pl
28-Aug-2005 05:28


I wrote usefull function which is support iso-8859-2 encoding with htmlentities function ;]



<?php

/*

 *    Function htmlentities which support iso-8859-2

 *

 *    @param string

 *    @return string

 *    @author FanFataL

 */

function htmlentities_iso88592($string='') {

    $pl_iso = array('&ecirc;', '&oacute;', '&plusmn;', '&para;', '&sup3;', '&iquest;', '&frac14;', '&aelig;', '&ntilde;', '&Ecirc;', '&Oacute;', '&iexcl;', '&brvbar;', '&pound;', '&not;', '&macr;', '&AElig;', '&Ntilde;');    

    $entitles = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);

    $entitles = array_diff($entitles, $pl_iso);

    return strtr($string, $entitles);

}

?>



Greatings ;-)

...

webmaster at swirldrop dot com
27-Jul-2005 02:45


To replace any characters in a string that could be 'dangerous' to put in an HTML/XML file with their numeric entities (e.g. &#233 for  [e acute]), you can use the following function:



function htmlnumericentities($str){

  return preg_replace('/[^!-%\x27-;=?-~ ]/e', '"&#".ord("$0").chr(59)', $str);

};//EoFn htmlnumericentities



To change any normal entities (e.g. &euro;) to numerical entities call:

$str = htmlnumericalentities(html_entity_decode($str));

rbotzer at yahoo dot com
20-Jul-2005 05:10


The existance of html entities such as &quot; inside an xml node causes most xml parsers to throw an error.  The following function cleans an input string by converting html entities to valid unicode entities.



<?php



function htmlentities2unicodeentities ($input) {

  $htmlEntities = array_values (get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES));

  $entitiesDecoded = array_keys   (get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES));

  $num = count ($entitiesDecoded);

  for ($u = 0; $u < $num; $u++) {

    $utf8Entities[$u] = '&#'.ord($entitiesDecoded[$u]).';';

  }

  return str_replace ($htmlEntities, $utf8Entities, $input);

}

?>



So, an input of

Copyrights &copy; make &quot;me&quot; grin &reg;



outputs

Copyrights &#169; make &#34;me&#34; grin &#174;

send at mail dot 2aj dot net
15-Jul-2005 01:03


If you are programming XML documents and are using the htmlentities function, then performing a  str_replace on ' into &apos; to set mandatory escape characters you can use this simple function instead.



This function, xmlentities, is basically the XML parsing equivalent of htmlentities, with fewer options than its HTML counterpart:



<?php

// XML Entity Mandatory Escape Characters

function xmlentities ( $string )

{

    return str_replace ( array ( '&', '"', "'", '<', '>' ), array ( '&amp;' , '&quot;', '&apos;' , '&lt;' , '&gt;' ), $string );

}

?>



Example:



<?php

function xmlentities($string)

{

    return str_replace ( array ( '&', '"', "'", '<', '>' ), array ( '&amp;' , '&quot;', '&apos;' , '&lt;' , '&gt;' ), $string );

}



echo xmlentities("If you don't use these mandatory escape characters <tags> between </tags>, XML will \"eXtensively\" & \"implicitly\" give you errors.");

?>



Produces...

If you don&apos;t use these mandatory escape characters &lt;tags&gt; between &lt;/tags&gt;, XML will &quot;eXtensively&quot; &amp; &quot;implicitly&quot; give you errors.

penfield888 at yahoo dot com
02-Feb-2005 01:40


This is a followup to the older note by mirrorball_girl (5 Jan 2003) for those who may follow.



Rather than making an exception for the en-dash (#150) and translating it to a hyphen, you could use the &#8211; unicode en-dash entity (assuming that you are serving up your pages as UTF-8 or some such encoding.



Also, the whole thing can be done better with mb_detect_order, mb_detect_encoding and mb_convert_encoding if all you want to do is serve up a web page (if you need to convert to pure ASCII, that's another issue). You need to have multi-byte support enabled on your PHP server.



Basically, the problem is with older MS programs that use Windows-1252 for their encoding, so all you really need to do is

- detect for Win-1252

- if present, convert to UTF-8

- serve up your pages as UTF-8



See the manual on Multibyte String Functions for more information.

root at joe-linux.NOSPAM.org
27-Jan-2005 06:48


It may come to you as a surprise, but i've noticed that in Firefox (as of 1.0), the text presented in "View selection source" is not the same as "View page source"; Il you want to see the REAL result of htmlentities() you should look at the entire source;



almost become mad before i discover this :)

marques at displague dot com
25-Jan-2005 02:01


htmlEncodeText (below) needs a small tweak, the dash needs to be made literal to get picked up in cases like '<a href="blah-blah.php">'.  I have been using this function to parse my postgresql database calls since I have alot of unicode data and I don't want HTML data to be neutered (via htmlentities()).





<?php


function htmlEncodeText ($string)


{


  $pattern = '<([a-zA-Z0-9\.\, "\'_\/\-\+~=;:\(\)?&#%![\]@]+)>';


  preg_match_all ('/' . $pattern . '/', $string, $tagMatches, PREG_SET_ORDER);


  $textMatches = preg_split ('/' . $pattern . '/', $string);





  foreach ($textMatches as $key => $value) {


   $textMatches [$key] = htmlentities ($value);


  }





  for ($i = 0; $i < count ($textMatches); $i ++) {


   $textMatches [$i] = $textMatches [$i] . $tagMatches [$i] [0];


  }





  return implode ($textMatches);


}


?>





--Editor note: Combined some corrections to the regex pattern, thanks to fabian dot lange at web dot de, hammertscrew at veryweb dot com, webmaster AT scholesmafia DOT co DOT uk, thomas AT cosifan DOT de and marques at displague dot com---

dumb at coder dot com
17-Jan-2005 08:22


/*

15Jan05



Within <textarea>, Browsers auto render & display certain "HTML Entities" and "HTML Entity Codes" as characters: 

&lt; shows as <    --    &amp; shows as &    --    etc.



Browsers also auto change any "HTML Entity Codes" entered in a <textarea> into the resultant display characters BEFORE UPLOADING.  There's no way to change this, making it difficult to edit html in a <textarea>



"HTML Entity Codes" (ie, use of &#60 to represent "<", &#38 to represent "&" &#160 to represent "&nbsp;") can be used instead.  Therefore, we need to "HTML-Entitize" the data for display, which changes the raw/displayed characters into their HTML Entity Code equivalents before being shown in a <textarea>.



how would I get a textarea to contain "&lt;" as a literal string of characters and not have it display a "<"

&amp;lt; is indeed the correct way of doing that. And if you wanted to display that, you'd need to use &amp;amp;lt;'. That's just how HTML entities work.



htmlspecialchars() is a subset of htmlentities()

the reverse (ie, changing html entity codes into displayed characters, is done w/ html_entity_decode()



google on ns_quotehtml and see http://aolserver.com/docs/tcl/ns_quotehtml.html

see also http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/

*/

Duane
09-Jan-2005 09:34


I found using:



preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,5};)/",

"&#38;",strtr($string, $trans));



didn't trap hex values (such as &#x7684;), so instead I ended

up using:



preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[x0-9a-f]{2,6};)/",

"&#38;", strtr($string, $trans));

olito24 at gmx dot de
13-Dec-2004 08:17


a function to encode everything but html tags. pattern improvement is much appreciated!



function htmlEncodeText ($string)

{

  $pattern = '<([a-zA-Z0-9\. "\'_\/-=;\(\)?&#%]+)>';

  preg_match_all ('/' . $pattern . '/', $string, $tagMatches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

  $textMatches = preg_split ('/' . $pattern . '/', $string);



  foreach ($textMatches as $key => $value) {

    $textMatches [$key] = htmlentities ($value);

  }



  for ($i = 0; $i < count ($textMatches); $i ++) {

    $textMatches [$i] = $textMatches [$i] . $tagMatches [$i] [0];

  }



  return implode ($textMatches);

}

duke at redump dot de
01-Nov-2004 10:44


The function xmlentities works great, but there can be up to 5 numbers after the &# string. See this for example:



&#12505;&#12540;&#12473;&#12508;&#12540;

&#12523;&#12473;&#12479;&#12540;&#12474;2



This is a valid (wrapped) japanese string. To successfully use it with xmlentities, you need to replace



return preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,3};)/","&#38;" , strtr($string, $trans));



with 



return preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,5};)/","&#38;" , strtr($string, $trans));



(3 to 5).



Duke

tmp1000 at fastmail dot deleteme dot fm
23-Oct-2004 01:07


Regarding the two great function posted by pinkpather and webwurst;  one to encode xml entities, the other to encode only the entities of a string not already encoded.  I've combined these two.  And IMHO made a small improvement by making the translation table static:



<?php

function xmlentities($string, $quote_style=ENT_QUOTES)

{

    static $trans;

    if (!isset($trans)) {

        $trans = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, $quote_style);

        foreach ($trans as $key => $value)

            $trans[$key] = '&#'.ord($key).';';

        // dont translate the '&' in case it is part of &xxx;

        $trans[chr(38)] = '&';

    }

    // after the initial translation, _do_ map standalone '&' into '&#38;'

    return preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,3};)/","&#38;" , strtr($string, $trans));

}

?>



Here's the snippet of code I'm testing with:



<?php

echo "<p>Testing xmlentities...</p>";

$strings[] = "No entities here.";

$strings[] = "<b>bold</b>";

$strings[] = "Got style? Try K & R.";

echo "<ul>";

foreach ($strings as $string) {

    echo "<li>Original string: ".htmlentities($string)."</li>\n";

    echo "<li>Encoded once: ".htmlentities(xmlentities($string))."</li>\n";

    echo "<li>Encoded twice: ".htmlentities(xmlentities(xmlentities($string)))."</li>\n";

    

}

echo "</ul>";



?>

Miguel (miguel at sigmanet dot com dot br)
20-Oct-2004 11:43


This is a simple script that I'm using to encode and decode values from a form. Save it with the name that you wish.



<?php



/*  When you call anyone of the two functions, set the $_str

     variable to the string that you want to encode or decode */



/* This function encodes the string.

    You can safetly use this function to save its result in a

    database. It eliminates any space in the beginning ou end

    of the string, HTML and PHP tags, and encode any special

    char to the usual HTML entities (&[...];), eliminating the

    possibility of bugs in inserting data on a table */

function encodeText($_str) {

  $_str = strip_tags($_str);

  $_str = trim($_str);

  $_str = htmlentities($_str);

  $_str = str_replace("\r\n", "#BR#", $_str);

  return($_str);

}



/* This function decodes the string.

    If you are showing the string in the body of a page, you

    can set the $_form variable to "false", and the function will

    use the "BR" tag to the new lines. But, if you need to show

    the string in a textarea, text or other input types of a form

    set the $_form variable to "true", then the function will use

    the "\r\n" to the new lines */

function decodeText($_str, $_form) {

  $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);

  $trans_tbl = array_flip ($trans_tbl);

  $_str      = strtr($_str, $trans_tbl);

  if ($_form) {

    $_nl = "\r\n";

  } else {

    $_nl = "<br>";

  }

  $_str      = str_replace("#BR#", "$_nl", $_str);

  return($_str);

}



?>

roland dot swingler at nospam dot transversal dot com
30-Sep-2004 11:39


You don't need these custom conversion functions.



This function will only work for the first 128 ascii characters if no character set is specified.  If you specify the character set in an http header:



<?php

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');



htmlentities('string to be encoded', ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8');

?>



then it will work for all html entities.  It outputs the named rather than the numerical entities, but html_entity_decode() will decode both numerical and textual entities (it will treat &#8364; and &euro; as the same).



BTW, if you are dealing with form submitted data, it is a good idea to add the accept-charset="character set" attribute 

to the form as well.

cd at NOSPAM dot deluxe dot cd
20-Sep-2004 12:47


allthough it is much more complex than this, please note that if you're using xhtml the character encoding you specify within your document is "associated" with the encoding used by php.



e.g.:



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="..."?>



may also assess the manner form data is submitted. as it is prepared before sending it does not matter whether it is post or get.



to give you something stoutly have a look at mozilla firefox (0.9.3) where submitting form data...



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>



...converts  to %E4



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>



...converts  to %C3%A4



or at internet explorer (6.0) where encoding is ignored while submit but default values of an input field let you recognize the same thing.



this may confuse you getting the desired &auml; afterwards.

porge
31-Aug-2004 11:09


Thanks attila at roughdot dot com, however I changed this to :



"/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,4};|#x[0-9a-fA-F]{2,4};)/"



in order to also to match hex-coded entities.

attila at roughdot dot com
05-Aug-2004 01:25


Thx for that function, pinkpanther at swissonline dot ch, though the number of digits after the '#' can be 4, not 3.

I bumped into this when struggeling with the euro sign (&#8364;).



function htmlentities2( $myHTML)

{

    $translation_table = get_html_translation_table( HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES);

    $translation_table[chr( 38)] = '&';

    return preg_replace( "/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,4};)/", "&amp;" , strtr( $myHTML, $translation_table));

}

m227 at poczta dot onet dot pl
26-May-2004 06:00


// tested with PHP 4.3.4, Apache 1.29 

// function works like original htmlentities

// but preserves Polish characters encoded in CP-1250

// (Windows code page) from false conversion



// m227@poczta.onet.pl, 2004



function htmlentities1250($str)

{

    // four chars does not need any conversion

    // s` (9c), z` (9f), Z` (8f), S` (8c)

    $trans = array(        

        "&sup3;"  => "\xb3", //  "l-"

        "&sup1;"  => "\xb9", //  "a,"

        "&ecirc;" => "\xea", //  "e,"

        "&aelig;" => "\xe6", //  "c`"

        "&ntilde;"=> "\xf1", //  "n`"                                        

        "&iquest;"=> "\xbf", //  "z."

        "&yen;"   => "\xa5", //  "A,"

        "&AElig;" => "\xc6", //  "C`"

        "&macr;"  => "\xaf", //  "Z."

        "&Ecirc;" => "\xca", //  "E,"

        "&oacute;"=> "\xf3", //  "o`"

        "&Oacute;"=> "\xd3", //  "O`"

        "&pound;" => "\xa3", //  "L-"

        "&Ntilde;"=> "\xd1"  //  "N`"

    );

    return strtr(htmlentities($str), $trans);

}

mail at britlinks dot com
20-May-2004 12:27


similar to cedric at shift-zone dot be's function, this 'cleans up' text from MS Word, and other non-alphanumeric characters to their valid [X]HTML counterparts



<?php

// strips slashes, and converts special characters to HTML equivalents for string defined in $var

function htmlfriendly($var,$nl2br = false){

    $chars = array(

        128 => '&#8364;',

        130 => '&#8218;',

        131 => '&#402;',

        132 => '&#8222;',

        133 => '&#8230;',

        134 => '&#8224;',

        135 => '&#8225;',

        136 => '&#710;',

        137 => '&#8240;',

        138 => '&#352;',

        139 => '&#8249;',

        140 => '&#338;',

        142 => '&#381;',

        145 => '&#8216;',

        146 => '&#8217;',

        147 => '&#8220;',

        148 => '&#8221;',

        149 => '&#8226;',

        150 => '&#8211;',

        151 => '&#8212;',

        152 => '&#732;',

        153 => '&#8482;',

        154 => '&#353;',

        155 => '&#8250;',

        156 => '&#339;',

        158 => '&#382;',

        159 => '&#376;');

    $var = str_replace(array_map('chr', array_keys($chars)), $chars, htmlentities(stripslashes($var)));

    if($nl2br){

        return nl2br($var);

    } else {

        return $var;

    }

}

?>

cedric at shift-zone dot be
04-May-2004 09:02


This is a conversion function for special chars.

Very usefull to convert a word document into valid html

(the html provided is successfully parsed by sablotron 0.97 using iso-8859-1 charset) :



function convertDoc2HTML($txt){

        $len = strlen($txt);

        $res = "";

        for($i = 0; $i < $len; ++$i) {

            $ord = ord($txt{$i});

            // check only non-standard chars          

            if($ord >= 126){ 

                $res .= "&#".$ord.";";

            }

            else {

                // escape ", ' and \ chars

                switch($ord){

                    case 34 : 

                        $res .= "\\\"";

                        break;

                    case 39 : 

                        $res .= "\'";

                        break;

                    case 92 : 

                        $res .= "\\\\";

                        break;                    

                    default : // the rest does not have to be modified

                        $res .= $txt{$i};

                }                    

            }

        }

        return $res;

}

jake_mcmahon at hotmail dot com
30-Apr-2004 05:29


This fuction is particularly useful against XSS (cross-site-scripting-). XSS makes use of holes in code, whether it be in Javascript or PHP. XSS often, if not always, uses HTML entities to do its evil deeds, so this function in co-operation with your scripts (particularly search or submitting scripts) is a very useful tool in combatting "H4X0rz".

Guillaume Beaulieu
12-Apr-2004 05:10


Here's a simple script to transform filename with accented character in it into much more usable unaccented character for a restrictive filesystem.



$string = htmlentities($stringToModify);

/* Take the first letter of the entity (if you got filename with ([<>] in it the result will probably remain lookable*/

$string =  preg_replace("/\&(.)[^;]*;/", "\\1", $string);

/* Change the whitespace into _*/

$string = preg_replace("/[ ]/", "_", $string);

/* Dance ! */

print $string;

Funky Ants
04-Apr-2004 03:55


I had a problem working with partially html encoded data, with a selection of unescaped ampersands, hex coded, and characters in "&amp;", style.

Which ive finally overcome by decoding all of the data, adn then reincoding it all.



I found a combination of a couple of peoples work useful.



function get_htmlspecialchars( $given, $quote_style = ENT_QUOTES ){

    return htmlentities( unhtmlentities(  $given ) , $quote_style  );

}



function unhtmlentities( $string ){

    $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table ( HTML_ENTITIES );

    $trans_tbl = array_flip( $trans_tbl );

    $ret = strtr( $string, $trans_tbl );

    return preg_replace( '/&#(\d+);/me' , "chr('\\1')" , $ret );

}

wwb at 3dwargamer dot net
01-Apr-2004 08:49


htmlentites is a very handy function, but it fails to fix one thing which I deal with alot: word 'smart' quotes and emdashes.



The below function replaces the funky double quotes with &quot;, funky single quotes with standard single quotes and fixes emdashes.



    function CleanupSmartQuotes($text)

    {

        $badwordchars=array(

                            chr(145),

                            chr(146),

                            chr(147),

                            chr(148),

                            chr(151)

                            );

        $fixedwordchars=array(

                            "'",

                            "'",

                            '&quot;',

                            '&quot;',

                            '&mdash;'

                            );

        return str_replace($badwordchars,$fixedwordchars,$text);

    }

arjini at mac dot com
19-Mar-2004 03:49


If you're looking to provide bare bones protection to email addresses posted to the web try this:



###



$string = 'arjini@mac.com';

for($i=0;$i<strlen($string);++$i){

    $n = rand(0,1);

    if($n)

        $finished.='&#x'.sprintf("%X",ord($string{$i})).';';

    else

        $finished.='&#'.ord($string{$i}).';';

}

echo $finished;



###



This randomly encodes a mix of hex and oridinary HTML entities for every character in the address. Note that a decoding mechanism for this could probably be written just as easily, so eventually the bots will be able to cut through this like butter, but for now, it seems like most harvesters are only looking for non-hex html entities.

stewey at ambitious dot ca
05-Mar-2004 10:11


This version of macRomanToIso (originally posted by: marcus at synchromedia dot co dot uk) offers a couple of improvements. First, it removes the extra slashes '\' that broke the original function. Second, it adds four quote characters not supported in ISO 8859-1. These are the left double quote, right double quote, left single quote and right single quote.



Be sure to remove the line breaks from the two strings going into strtr or this function will not work properly.



Be careful what text you apply this to. If you apply it to ISO 8859-1 encoded text it will likely wreak havoc. I'll save you some trouble with this bit of advice: don't bother trying to detect what charset a certain text file is using, it can't be done reliably. Instead, consider making assumptions based upon the HTTP_USER_AGENT, or prompting the user to specify the character encoding used (perhaps both).



<?php



/**

 * Converts MAC OS ROMAN encoded strings to the ISO 8859-1 charset.

 *

 * @param    string    the string to convert.

 * @return    string    the converted string.

 */

function macRomanToIso($string)

{

    return strtr($string,

"\x80\x81\x82\x83\x84\x85\x86\x87\x88\x89\x8a\x8b

\x8c\x8d\x8e\x8f\x90\x91\x92\x93\x94\x95\x96\x97

\x98\x99\x9a\x9b\x9c\x9d\x9e\x9f\xa1\xa4\xa6\xa7

\xa8\xab\xac\xae\xaf\xb4\xbb\xbc\xbe\xbf\xc0\xc1

\xc2\xc7\xc8\xca\xcb\xcc\xd6\xd8\xdb\xe1\xe5\xe6

\xe7\xe8\xe9\xea\xeb\xec\xed\xee\xef\xf1\xf2\xf3

\xf4\xf8\xfc\xd2\xd3\xd4\xd5",

"\xc4\xc5\xc7\xc9\xd1\xd6\xdc\xe1\xe0\xe2\xe4\xe3

\xe5\xe7\xe9\xe8\xea\xeb\xed\xec\xee\xef\xf1\xf3

\xf2\xf4\xf6\xf5\xfa\xf9\xfb\xfc\xb0\xa7\xb6\xdf\xae

\xb4\xa8\xc6\xd8\xa5\xaa\xba\xe6\xf8\xbf\xa1\xac

\xab\xbb\xa0\xc0\xc3\xf7\xff\xa4\xb7\xc2\xca\xc1

\xcb\xc8\xcd\xce\xcf\xcc\xd3\xd4\xd2\xda\xdb\xd9

\xaf\xb8\x22\x22\x27\x27");

}



?>

Julien CROUZET
28-Nov-2003 04:01


If you are looking for a htmlentities inverse :

<?

$table        = array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES));

$plaintext    = strtr($html, $table);

?>



Here is a full example to extract plaintext from a SIMPLE html page (not table, etc...)



<?

$file_content     = file_get_contents($htmlfile);

$file_content     = strip_tags($file_content, '<br>');

$file_content     = preg_replace('/<br( )?(\/)?>/i', "\n", $file_content);

$file_content     = wordwrap($file_content);

$table            = array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES));

$file_content     = strtr($file_content, $table);

?>

root[noSPAM]cyberdark.net
24-Nov-2003 10:53


A little function that may help someone. Is useful where, FE, someone writes a text through a content management panel and is also able to put html (bolds, italics,...), so we don't want to convert html tags but all the rest. The code offers a few examples of extra entities.



function myhtmlentities($str) {

            

    $tbl=get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);

            

    unset ($tbl["<"]);

    unset ($tbl[">"]);

    unset ($tbl["'"]);

    unset ($tbl['"']);



    $tbl[""]="&quot;";

    $tbl[""]="&quot;";

    $tbl[""]="...";

    $tbl[""]="-";

    $tbl[""]="&raquo;";

    $tbl[""]="&laquo;";

            

    return str_replace(array_keys($tbl),array_values($tbl),$str);

            

}

dmurphy at telegeography dot com
20-Sep-2003 02:14


// htmlentities() does not support Mac Roman, so this is a workaround. It requires the below table.

// This function runs on a Mac OSX machine, where text is stored in the Mac Roman character set inside a Mac OSX MySQL table.

function custom_htmlentities ($string, $table) {

    // Loop throught the array, replacing each ocurrance

    for ($n = 0; $n < count($table); $n++) {

        $table_line = each($table);

        // use the chr function to get the one character string for each ascii decimal code

        $find_char = chr($table_line[key]);

        $replace_string = $table_line[value];

        $string = str_replace($find_char, $replace_string, $string);    

    }

    return $string;

}

pinkpanther at swissonline dot ch
28-Jul-2003 05:29


In case you want a 'htmlentities' function which prevents 'double' encoding of the ampersands of already present entities (&gt; => &amp;gt;), use this:



function htmlentities2($myHTML) {

   $translation_table=get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES,ENT_QUOTES);

   $translation_table[chr(38)] = '&';

   return preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,3};)/","&amp;" , strtr($myHTML, $translation_table));

}

defrostdj at defrostdj dot com
26-Jul-2003 03:10


Here you have a character map function ;)



<?php 

function htmldecode($encoded, $char = 'HTML_SPECIALCHARS') {

    foreach($encoded as $key => $value){

        echo $value .' --> '; 

        if ($char == 'HTML_SPECIALCHARS') {

            echo htmlspecialchars($value);

        } else {

            echo htmlentities($value);

        }

        echo '&gtbr&lt';

    }

}

echo 'ENTITIES<&gtbr&lt><&gtbr&lt>';

$entities = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);

htmldecode($entities, 'HTML_ENTITIES');

echo '<&gtbr&lt>SPECIAL CHARACTERS<&gtbr&lt><&gtbr&lt>';

$specialchars = get_html_translation_table (HTML_SPECIALCHARS);

htmldecode($specialchars, 'HTML_SPECIALCHARS');



?>



So next time you're developing you'll always have a charmap ready to use.

webwurst at web dot de
30-Jun-2003 03:20


This function changes all entities to unicode-entities.

For example '<' becomes '&#60;', '' becomes '&#169;', etc.



function xmlentities($string, $quote_style=ENT_COMPAT)

{

    $trans = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, $quote_style);



    foreach ($trans as $key => $value)

        $trans[$key] = '&#'.ord($key).';';



    return strtr($string, $trans);

}

Anthony Aragues
24-Jun-2003 07:24


I found in a previous not the function for encoding the input... which worked great, but it also encoded the &nbsp and <br> that was being automatically added in my POST, so I created and Output function to go with it that worked for me:

function VerbatimInput($String)

    {

    $Output = mysql_escape_string(htmlentities(addslashes($String)));

    return $Output;

    }



function VerbatimOutput($Input)

    {

    $Output = str_replace("&lt;br /&gt;", "<br>", "$Input");

        $Output = str_replace("&amp;nbsp;", "&nbsp", "$Output");

    return $Output;

    }

rob at neorosa dot com
01-Mar-2003 12:12


This function will encode everything, either using ascii values or special entities:



function encode_everything($string){

    $encoded = "";

    for ($n=0;$n<strlen($string);$n++){

        $check = htmlentities($string[$n],ENT_QUOTES);

       $string[$n] == $check ? $encoded .= "&#".ord($string[$n]).";" : $encoded .= $check;

    }

    return $encoded;

}



so you can use:



$emailAddress = encode_everything($emailAddress);



to protect an email address - although I imagine it's not a great deal of protection.

Bassie (:
06-Jan-2003 08:07


Note that you'll have use htmlentities() before any other function who'll edit text like nl2br().



If you use nl2br() first, the htmlentities() function will change < br > to &lt;br&gt;.

kumar at chicagomodular.com
29-Oct-2002 09:51


without heavy scientific analysis, this seems to work as a quick fix to making text originating from a Microsoft Word document display as HTML:



function DoHTMLEntities ($string)

    {

        $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);

        

        // MS Word strangeness.. 

        // smart single/ double quotes:

        $trans_tbl[chr(145)] = '\''; 

        $trans_tbl[chr(146)] = '\''; 

        $trans_tbl[chr(147)] = '&quot;'; 

        $trans_tbl[chr(148)] = '&quot;'; 

        //  :

        $trans_tbl[chr(142)] = '&eacute;';

        

        return strtr ($string, $trans_tbl);

    }

add a note

htmlentities

Description