Convert HTML entities to their corresponding characters

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- Convert HTML entities to their corresponding characters

# html_entity_decode

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

html_entity_decode — Convert HTML entities to their corresponding characters

### Description

html_entity_decode(string `$string`, int `$flags` = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401, ?string `$encoding` = `null`): string

html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts HTML entities in the `string` to their corresponding characters.

More precisely, this function decodes all the entities (including all numeric entities) that a) are necessarily valid for the chosen document type — i.e., for XML, this function does not decode named entities that might be defined in some DTD — and b) whose character or characters are in the coded character set associated with the chosen encoding and are permitted in the chosen document type. All other entities are left as is.

### Parameters

`string`

  The input string.

`flags`

  A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes and which document type to use. The default is `ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401`.

  Available `flags` constants
  Constant Name | Description
  --- | ---
  `ENT_COMPAT` | Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.
  `ENT_QUOTES` | Will convert both double and single quotes.
  `ENT_NOQUOTES` | Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted.
  `ENT_SUBSTITUTE` | Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#xFFFD; (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
  `ENT_HTML401` | Handle code as HTML 4.01.
  `ENT_XML1` | Handle code as XML 1.
  `ENT_XHTML` | Handle code as XHTML.
  `ENT_HTML5` | Handle code as HTML 5.

`encoding`

  An optional argument defining the encoding used when converting characters.

  If omitted, `encoding` defaults to the value of the default_charset configuration option.

  Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to specify the correct value for your code if the default_charset configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.

  The following character sets are supported:

  Supported charsets
  Charset | Aliases | Description
  --- | --- | ---
  ISO-8859-1 | ISO8859-1 | Western European, Latin-1.
  ISO-8859-5 | ISO8859-5 | Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
  ISO-8859-15 | ISO8859-15 | Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish letters missing in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
  UTF-8 |  | ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode.
  cp866 | ibm866, 866 | DOS-specific Cyrillic charset.
  cp1251 | Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 | Windows-specific Cyrillic charset.
  cp1252 | Windows-1252, 1252 | Windows specific charset for Western European.
  KOI8-R | koi8-ru, koi8r | Russian.
  BIG5 | 950 | Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan.
  GB2312 | 936 | Simplified Chinese, national standard character set.
  BIG5-HKSCS |  | Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese.
  Shift_JIS | SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 | Japanese
  EUC-JP | EUCJP, eucJP-win | Japanese
  MacRoman |  | Charset that was used by Mac OS.
  `''` |  | An empty string activates detection from script encoding (Zend multibyte), default_charset and current locale (see nl_langinfo() and setlocale()), in this order. Not recommended.

  > Note: Any other character sets are not recognized. The default encoding will be used instead and a warning will be emitted.

### Return Values

Returns the decoded string.

### Changelog

Version | Description
--- | ---
8.1.0 | `flags` changed from `ENT_COMPAT` to `ENT_QUOTES` | `ENT_SUBSTITUTE` | `ENT_HTML401`.
8.0.0 | `encoding` is nullable now.

### Examples

Example #1 Decoding HTML entities

    <?php$orig = "I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now";$a = htmlentities($orig);$b = html_entity_decode($a);echo $a; // I'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; nowecho $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now?>

### Notes

> Note:

> You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode('&nbsp;')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the '&nbsp;' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 encoding.

### See Also

- htmlentities() - Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
- htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities
- get_html_translation_table() - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities
- urldecode() - Decodes URL-encoded string