How to read a PHP string as HTML

Question

I have a PHP file I'm using to generate an HTML file. This is the process:

$document = new DomDocument;
$document->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$document->validateOnParse = true;
$document->loadHTML(file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/base.html"));

$testNode = $document->createElement("div", "This is a <br> test");
$document->appendChild($testNode);

$document->saveHTMLFile("output.html");

This spits out an HTML file containing the following element:

<div>This is a &lt;br&gt; test</div>

That is, the   tags get converted to   in the actual HTML. I have tried all of these methods to unescape the string:

htmlspecialchars("This is a <br> test");

rawurldecode("This is a <br> test");

urldecode("This is a <br> test");

function decodeashtml($str) {
$str = preg_replace("/%u([0-9a-f]{3,4})/i","&#x\\1;",urldecode($str));
return html_entity_decode($str,null,'UTF-8');;
}
decodeashtml("This is a <br> test");

but they all produce:

This is a test

What else can I do to get HTML tags to appear correctly as HTML?

You could str_replace it? Make an array of all the values you need. Same principle as bbcode — Jeroen Bellemans
– Jeroen Bellemans, Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 13:27
I see why you use it now. The solution offered by ceejayoz is probably the best you'll get. — Styphon
– Styphon, Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 15:27

sumitjainjr · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-23 13:35:16Z

1

you can try this:

<?php echo html_entity_decode("this is <br> test."); ?>

answered Sep 23, 2015 at 13:35

sumitjainjr

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2 Comments

Naftali Beder Over a year ago

Because I don't want to output the text directly on the page, but rather want to store it in a variable, I don't think I can use echo.

sumitjainjr Over a year ago

so you can also store this in a php variable, and whenever you want to use then you can.

ceejayoz · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-23 13:44:25Z

1

This is a test is a p element containing a text node, a br element, and another text node.

To do this properly with PHP's XML writer:

$element = $document->createElement('p');

$element->appendChild($document->createTextNode('This is a '));
$element->appendChild($document->createElement('br'));
$element->appendChild($document->createTextNode(' test'));

$document->appendChild($element);

answered Sep 23, 2015 at 13:44

ceejayoz

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1 Comment

Naftali Beder Over a year ago

This works, thank you. It's a little more verbose than I was hoping for (I'd hoped to be able to use HEREDOC for multi-line HTML text), so before I accept this as the right answer, I want to check if there's a way to do that instead.

Naftali Beder · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-28 20:34:20Z

1

So I found exactly what I'm looking for:

$document = new DomDocument;
$document->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$document->validateOnParse = true;
$document->loadHTML(file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/base.html"));

$newDiv = $document->createElement("div");
$fragment = $document->createDocumentFragment();
$fragment->appendXML("<p>I can write<br/>my HTML here.</p>");
$newDiv->appendChild($fragment);

$document->appendChild($newDiv);

$document->saveHTMLFile("output.html");

answered Sep 28, 2015 at 20:34

Naftali Beder

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