How to use PHP htmlentities()?

Question

In my project I currently use htmlentities() to filter data coming from the database:

echo htmlentities($variable_name);

I am in the USA and this works fine for me. My friend is in Brazil and for him some text characters don't show up correctly.

How can I use htmlentities() so it internationalizes properly?

What Keoki said. Also since you are generally using it a lot it's highly advisable to write a wrapper function -- html() and h() are common. Using htmlspecialchars() would eschew the charset issue and be compliant to the older xhtml syntax. (But better use the charset parameter for reliability). — mario
– mario, Commented Jun 25, 2011 at 4:28

user456814 · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-25 04:15:19Z

5

The problem could be that the output is not encoded in UTF-8. According to the php docs for htmlentities, the function

takes an optional third argument charset which defines character set used in conversion. Presently, the ISO-8859-1 character set is used as the default.

So you can try calling

htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

instead, and that might fix the problem, since it's not the default character encoding.

answered Jun 25, 2011 at 4:15

user456814

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1 Comment

Kinjal Dixit Over a year ago

@usnidorg could you please also try simply adding <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in the head, and not pass additional parameters to htmlentities and check if that works

John · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-25 04:33:00Z

0

While I suspect Keoki has it correct, another possible problem could be the font. If using a special character where your friend's font doesn't contain that character, they'll just see the missing character sign. In the webpage or whatever medium you are using to post the character, be sure that a font is set, as there's no guarentees on the default font working.

If neither of these be the case though, what is an example character that isn't showing up? Can you post the full code you are using?

answered Jun 25, 2011 at 4:33

John

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Sanjeev Chauhan · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-25 04:39:49Z

0

You can also try iconv to Convert string to requested character encoding

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

answered Jun 25, 2011 at 4:39

Sanjeev Chauhan

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