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I have a string that contains html. How would I htmlentity the string so that everything except tags are encoded? For example:

$foo = '<div class="link">Here\'s is a link: "<a href="http://www.example.com">Doors & windows</a>'</div>';

I want to convert it to 

$out = '<div class="link">Here\'s is a link: &quot;<a href="http://www.example.com">Doors &amp; windows</a>&quot;</div>';
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  • 1
    That'd have to be $out = "<div class=\"link\" etc.... anyways, otherwise both of your versions are syntax errors. Commented Jun 20, 2011 at 21:04
  • Can you explain why do you need this? Because I see no sense of doing this. I know only 2 cases when htmlentities are needed: (1) When we want to make regular text or values of html atributes to NOT interfere with html language elements. (2) When there is a need to show some special symbols from different charset than page's one. Commented Jun 20, 2011 at 21:28
  • Well, the answer to your question is simple, I want valid html. My string contains html which may contain characters that aren't valid. I want the html elements to remain intact, but run htmlentities on the data inside of those elements. Commented Jun 20, 2011 at 21:33

3 Answers 3

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This code snippet shows a function that will load some xml (ensure that at least tags opened have a closing pendant and such, otherwise you will see / read some errors) and then applies htmlentities onto all text-nodes. I actually have no real clue for what you need that, but probably it makes you happy:

$foo = '<div class="link">Here\'s is a link: <a href="http://www.example.com">Doors & windows</a></div>';

echo text_htmlentities(utf8_encode($foo));

/**
 * add htmlentities onto the text-nodes of an
 * xml fragment.
 * 
 * @param string $foo xml fragment (utf8)
 * @return string
 */
function text_htmlentities($foo) {
    $foo = str_replace('&', '&amp;', $foo);
    $dom = new DOMDocument;
    $dom->loadXml($foo);
    $xpath = new DomXpath($dom);
    foreach($xpath->query('//text()') as $node) {
        $node->nodeValue = htmlentities($node->nodeValue, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8', false);
    }
    return str_replace('&amp;','&', $dom->saveXml($dom->firstChild));
}

output:

<div class="link">Here&#039;s is a link: <a href="http://www.example.com">Doors &amp; windows</a></div>
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3 Comments

I was beginning to wonder if anybody was understanding what i was wanting to do.. This works, except it only works for xml, is there a solution for html?
@nathanjosiah which charset uses your page?
@nathanjosiah: Updated the code. The function expects a string with utf8 encoding. utf8_encode — Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8
1

First replace the brackets with another token, call htmlentities, then convert back.

$html = str_replace("<","***OPENBRACKET***",$html);
$html = str_replace(">","***CLOSEBRACKET***",$html);

$html = htmlentities($html);

$html = str_replace("***OPENBRACKET***","<",$html);
$html = str_replace("***CLOSEBRACKET***",">",$html);
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1 Comment

Then you need to use an HTML parser, and run htmlentities on the text nodes.
0

Try using html_entity_decode function

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