htmlspecialchars

    (PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

    htmlspecialchars — Convertit les caractères spéciaux en entités HTML

    Description

    htmlspecialchars(
        string $string,
        int $flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401,
        ?string $encoding = null,
        bool $double_encode = true
    ): string

    Certains caractères ont des significations spéciales en HTML, et doivent être remplacés par des entités HTML pour conserver leurs significations. Cette fonction retourne une chaîne de caractères avec ces modifications. Si vous avez besoin que toutes les sous-chaînes en entrée qui sont associées à des entités nommées soient transformées, utilisez la fonction htmlentities().

    Si la chaîne en entrée passée à cette fonction et le document final partagent le même jeu de caractères, cette fonction est suffisante pour préparer l'entrée pour une inclusion dans la plupart des contextes d'un document HTML. Si cependant, l'entrée peut présenter des caractères qui ne sont pas codés dans le jeu de caractères du document final, et que vous souhaitez épargner ces caractères (comme des numériques ou des entités nommés), cette fonction et la fonction htmlentities() (qui n'encodes que les sous-chaînes qui ont des entités nommés équivalentes) ne sont pas suffisantes. Vous devez utiliser la fonction mb_encode_numericentity() à la place.

    Remplacement effectué
    Caractère Remplacement
    & (ET commercial) &
    " (double guillement) " sauf si ENT_NOQUOTES
    ' (simple guillemet) ' (pour ENT_HTML401) ou ' (pour ENT_XML1, ENT_XHTML ou ENT_HTML5), mais seulement lorsque ENT_QUOTES est défini
    < (inférieur à) &lt;
    > (supérieur à) &gt;

    Liste de paramètres

    string

    La chaîne à convertir.

    flags

    Un masque bit d'un ou plusieurs drapeaux suivants, qui déterminent la façon dont les guillemets seront gérés, dont les séquences de code invalide seront gérées ainsi que le type du document utilisé. Par défaut, c'est ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

    Constantes disponibles pour flags
    Constante Description
    ENT_COMPAT Convertit les guillemets doubles, et ignore les guillemets simples.
    ENT_QUOTES Convertit les guillemets doubles et les guillemets simples.
    ENT_NOQUOTES Ignore les guillemets doubles et les guillemets simples.
    ENT_IGNORE Ignore les séquences de caractères invalides plutôt que de retourner une chaine vide. L'utilisation de ce drapeau est fortement déconseillé pour des » raisons de sécurité.
    ENT_SUBSTITUTE Remplace les séquences de code invalide avec un caractère de remplacement Unicode U+FFFD (UTF-8) ou &#xFFFD; (sinon) au lieu de retourner une chaîne vide.
    ENT_DISALLOWED Remplace les points du code invalides du document fourni avec un caractère de remplacement Unicode U+FFFD (UTF-8) ou &#xFFFD; (sinon) au lieu de le laisser tel quel. Ceci peut être utile pour, par exemple, s'assurer du bon formatage de documents XML contenant du contenu externe.
    ENT_HTML401 Gère le code comme étant du HTML 4.01.
    ENT_XML1 Gère le code comme étant du XML 1.
    ENT_XHTML Gère le code comme étant du XHTML.
    ENT_HTML5 Gère le code comme étant du HTML 5.

    encoding

    Un argument optionnel définissant l'encodage utilisé lors de la conversion des caractères.

    Si omis, la valeur par défaut du paramètre encoding est la valeur de l'option de configuration default_charset.

    Malgré le fait que cet argument soit techniquement optionnel, vous êtes vivement encouragé à spécifier la valeur correcte pour votre code si l'option de configuration default_charset a été définie de façon incorrecte pour l'entrée fournie.

    Pour cette fonction, les encodages ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, UTF-8, cp866, cp1251, cp1252, et KOI8-R sont équivalents, à condition que le paramètre string soit valable pour l'encodage, dans le sens où les caractères affectés par la fonction htmlspecialchars() occupent la même position dans tous ces encodages.

    Les jeux de caractères suivants sont supportés :

    Jeux de caractères supportés
    Jeux de caractères Alias Description
    ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Europe occidentale, Latin-1.
    ISO-8859-5 ISO8859-5 Jeu de caractère cyrillique rarement utilisé (Latin/Cyrillic).
    ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 Europe occidentale, Latin-9. Dispose du signe Euro, des caractères spéciaux français et finlandais, qui manquent au Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
    UTF-8   Unicode 8 bits multioctets, compatible avec l'ASCII
    cp866 ibm866, 866 Jeu de caractères Cyrillique spécifique à DOS.
    cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Jeu de caractères Cyrillic spécifique à Windows.
    cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Jeu de caractères spécifique de Windows pour l'Europe occidentale.
    KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Russe.
    BIG5 950 Chinois traditionnel, principalement utilisé à Taïwan.
    GB2312 936 Chinois simplifié, officiel.
    BIG5-HKSCS   Big5 avec les extensions de Hong Kong, chinois traditionnel.
    Shift_JIS SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 Japonais
    EUC-JP EUCJP, eucJP-win Japonais
    MacRoman   Jeu de caractères utilisé par Mac OS.
    ''   Une chaîne vide active la détection de l'encodage depuis un script (multioctet Zend), default_charset et la locale courante (voir nl_langinfo() et setlocale()), dans cet ordre. Non recommandé.

    Note: Les autres jeux de caractères ne sont pas reconnus. L'encodage par défaut sera utilisé à la place et une alerte sera émise.

    double_encode

    Lorsque le paramètre double_encode est désactivé, PHP n'encodera pas les entités html existants ; par défaut, tout est converti.

    Valeurs de retour

    La chaîne convertie.

    Si la chaîne d'entrée string contient une séquence de code invalide dans le paramètre encoding fourni, une chaîne vide sera retournée à moins que le drapeau ENT_IGNORE ou ENT_SUBSTITUTE ne soit défini.

    Historique

    Version Description
    8.1.0 flags à changé de ENT_COMPAT à ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

    Exemples

    Exemple #1 Exemple avec htmlspecialchars()

    <?php
    $new     = htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_QUOTES);
    echo     $new; // &lt;a href=&#039;test&#039;&gt;Test&lt;/a&gt;
    ?>

    Notes

    Note:

    Notez que cette fonction ne fait aucun autre remplacement que ceux qui sont listés ci-dessus. Pour faire un remplacement total, voyez plutôt htmlentities().

    Note:

    Dans le cas d'une valeur ambigue pour flags, les règles suivantes s'appliquent :

    Voir aussi

    Found A Problem?

    Learn How To Improve This Page • Submit a Pull Request • Report a Bug
    ＋add a note

    User Contributed Notes 19 notes

    up
    72
    Dave
    11 years ago
    As of PHP 5.4 they changed default encoding from "ISO-8859-1" to "UTF-8". So if you get null from htmlspecialchars or htmlentities

    where you have only set
    <?php
    echo htmlspecialchars($string);
    echo     htmlentities($string);
    ?>

    you can fix it by
    <?php
    echo htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_COMPAT,'ISO-8859-1', true);
    echo     htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT,'ISO-8859-1', true);
    ?>

    On linux you can find the scripts you need to fix by

    grep -Rl "htmlspecialchars\\|htmlentities" /path/to/php/scripts/
    up
    45
    Mike Robinson
    11 years ago
    Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the PHP devs did not provide ANY way to set the default encoding used by htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities(), even though they changed the default encoding in PHP 5.4 (*golf clap for PHP devs*). To save someone the time of trying it, this does not work:

    <?php
    ini_set    ('default_charset', $charset); // doesn't work.
    ?>

    Unfortunately, the only way to not have to explicitly provide the second and third parameter every single time this function is called (which gets extremely tedious) is to write your own function as a wrapper:

    <?php
    define    ('CHARSET', 'ISO-8859-1');
    define('REPLACE_FLAGS', ENT_COMPAT | ENT_XHTML);

    function     html($string) {
    return     htmlspecialchars($string, REPLACE_FLAGS, CHARSET);
    }

    echo     html("ñ"); // works
    ?>

    You can do the same for htmlentities()
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    23
    Thomasvdbulk at gmail dot com
    13 years ago
    i searched for a while for a script, that could see the difference between an html tag and just < and > placed in the text,
    the reason is that i recieve text from a database,
    wich is inserted by an html form, and contains text and html tags,
    the text can contain < and >, so does the tags,
    with htmlspecialchars you can validate your text to XHTML,
    but you'll also change the tags, like <b> to &lt;b&gt;,
    so i needed a script that could see the difference between those two...
    but i couldn't find one so i made my own one,
    i havent fully tested it, but the parts i tested worked perfect!
    just for people that were searching for something like this,
    it may looks big, could be done easier, but it works for me, so im happy.

    <?php
    function fixtags($text){
    $text = htmlspecialchars($text);
    $text = preg_replace("/=/", "=\"\"", $text);
    $text = preg_replace("/&quot;/", "&quot;\"", $text);
    $tags = "/&lt;(\/|)(\w*)(\ |)(\w*)([\\\=]*)(?|(\")\"&quot;\"|)(?|(.*)?&quot;(\")|)([\ ]?)(\/|)&gt;/i";
    $replacement = "<$1$2$3$4$5$6$7$8$9$10>";
    $text = preg_replace($tags, $replacement, $text);
    $text = preg_replace("/=\"\"/", "=", $text);
    return     $text;
    }
    ?>

    an example:

    <?php
    $string     = "
    this is smaller < than this<br />
    this is greater > than this<br />
    this is the same = as this<br />
    <a href=\"http://www.example.com/example.php?test=test\">This is a link</a><br />
    <b>Bold</b> <i>italic</i> etc..."    ;
    echo     fixtags($string);
    ?>

    will echo:
    this is smaller &lt; than this<br />
    this is greater &gt; than this<br />
    this is the same = as this<br />
    <a href="http://www.example.com/example.php?test=test">This is a link</a><br />
    <b>Bold</b> <i>italic</i> etc...

    I hope its helpfull!!
    up
    16
    Kenneth Kin Lum
    16 years ago
    if your goal is just to protect your page from Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack, or just to show HTML tags on a web page (showing <body> on the page, for example), then using htmlspecialchars() is good enough and better than using htmlentities(). A minor point is htmlspecialchars() is faster than htmlentities(). A more important point is, when we use htmlspecialchars($s) in our code, it is automatically compatible with UTF-8 string. Otherwise, if we use htmlentities($s), and there happens to be foreign characters in the string $s in UTF-8 encoding, then htmlentities() is going to mess it up, as it modifies the byte 0x80 to 0xFF in the string to entities like &eacute;. (unless you specifically provide a second argument and a third argument to htmlentities(), with the third argument being "UTF-8").

    The reason htmlspecialchars($s) already works with UTF-8 string is that, it changes bytes that are in the range 0x00 to 0x7F to &lt; etc, while leaving bytes in the range 0x80 to 0xFF unchanged. We may wonder whether htmlspecialchars() may accidentally change any byte in a 2 to 4 byte UTF-8 character to &lt; etc. The answer is, it won't. When a UTF-8 character is 2 to 4 bytes long, all the bytes in this character is in the 0x80 to 0xFF range. None can be in the 0x00 to 0x7F range. When a UTF-8 character is 1 byte long, it is just the same as ASCII, which is 7 bit, from 0x00 to 0x7F. As a result, when a UTF-8 character is 1 byte long, htmlspecialchars($s) will do its job, and when the UTF-8 character is 2 to 4 bytes long, htmlspecialchars($s) will just pass those bytes unchanged. So htmlspecialchars($s) will do the same job no matter whether $s is in ASCII, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), or UTF-8.
    up
    5
    Daniel Klein
    2 years ago
    Because the documentation says

    int $flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401

    you would think that ENT_HTML401 is important. But as the notes mention, ENT_HTML401 is the default if you don't specify the doc type. This is because ENT_HTML401 === 0. So

    int $flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401

    is exactly equivalent to

    int $flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE
    up
    10
    Felix D.
    10 years ago
    Another thing important to mention is that
    htmlspecialchars(NULL)
    returnes an empty string and not NULL!
    up
    5
    ASchmidt at Anamera dot net
    3 years ago
    One MUST specify ENT_HTML5 in addition to double_encode=false to avoid double-encoding.

    The reason is that contrary to the documentation, double_encode=false will NOT unconditionally and globally prevent double-encoding of ALL existing entities. Crucially, it will only skip double-encoding for THOSE character entities that are explicitly valid for the document type chosen!

    Since ENT_HTML5 references the most expansive list of character entities, it is the only setting that will be most lenient with existing character entities.

    <?php
    declare(strict_types=1);
    $text = 'ampersand(&amp;), double quote(&quot;), single quote(&apos;), less than(&lt;), greater than(&gt;), numeric entities(&#x26;&#x22;&#x27;&#x3C;&#x3E;), HTML 5 entities(&plus;&comma;&excl;&dollar;&lpar;&ncedil;&euro;)';
    $result3 = htmlspecialchars( $text, ENT_NOQUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8', /*double_encode*/false );
    $result4 = htmlspecialchars( $text, ENT_NOQUOTES | ENT_XML1 | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8', /*double_encode*/false );
    $result5 = htmlspecialchars( $text, ENT_NOQUOTES | ENT_XHTML | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8', /*double_encode*/false );
    $result6 = htmlspecialchars( $text, ENT_NOQUOTES | ENT_HTML5 | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8', /*double_encode*/false );

    echo     "<br />\r\nHTML 4.01:<br />\r\n", $result3,
    "<br />\r\nXML 1:<br />\r\n", $result4,
    "<br />\r\nXHTML:<br />\r\n", $result5,
    "<br />\r\nHTML 5:<br />\r\n", $result6, "<br />\r\n";
    ?>

    will produce:

    HTML 4.01 (will NOT recognize single quote, but Euro):
    ampersand(&), double quote("), single quote(&apos;), less than(<), greater than(>), numeric entities(&"'<>), HTML 5 entities(&plus;&comma;&excl;&dollar;&lpar;&ncedil;€)

    XML 1 (WILL recognize single quote, but NOT Euro):
    ampersand(&), double quote("), single quote('), less than(<), greater than(>), numeric entities(&"'<>), HTML 5 entities(&plus;&comma;&excl;&dollar;&lpar;&ncedil;&euro;)

    XHTML (recognizes single quote and Euro):
    ampersand(&), double quote("), single quote('), less than(<), greater than(>), numeric entities(&"'<>), HTML 5 entities(&plus;&comma;&excl;&dollar;&lpar;&ncedil;€)

    HTML 5 (recognizes "all" valid character entities):
    ampersand(&), double quote("), single quote('), less than(<), greater than(>), numeric entities(&"'<>), HTML 5 entities(+,!$(ņ€)
    up
    11
    ivan at lutrov dot com
    13 years ago
    Be careful, the "charset" argument IS case sensitive. This is counter-intuitive and serves no practical purpose because the HTML spec actually has the opposite.
    up
    1
    Killian Leroux
    2 years ago
    Thanks Thomasvdbulk for your workaround, I would like to add a precision:

    When the HTML contains a link tag without new line before the script doesn't work :/

    Your example:

    <?php
    $string     = "
    this is smaller < than this<br />
    this is greater > than this<br />
    this is the same = as this<br />
    <a href=\"http://www.example.com/example.php?test=test\">This is a link</a><br />
    <b>Bold</b> <i>italic</i> etc..."    ;
    echo     fixtags($string);
    ?>

    Works but this doesn't work:

    <?php
    $string     = "
    this is smaller < than this<br />
    this is greater > than this<br />
    this is the same = as this<br /><a href=\"http://www.example.com/example.php?test=test\">This is a link</a><br />
    <b>Bold</b> <i>italic</i> etc..."    ;
    echo     fixtags($string);
    ?>

    So I add a little workaround at the beginning (before htmlspecialchars):

    <?php
    $text     = preg_replace('/<a/', "\r\n<a", $text);
    ?>

    I don't like that but I don't find other solution... :/
    up
    4
    qshing1437 at hotmail dot com
    5 years ago
    If you use htmlspecialchars() to escape any HTML attribute, make sure use double quote instead of single quote for the attribute.

    For Example,

    > Wrap with Single Quote
    <?php
    echo "<p title='" . htmlspecialchars("Hello\"s\'world") . "'">

    // title will end up Hello"s\ and rest of the text after single quote will be cut off.
    ?>

    > Wrap with Double quote :
    <?php
    echo '<p title="' . htmlspecialchars("Hello\"s\'world") . '"'>

    // title will show up correctly as Hello"s'world
    ?>
    up
    8
    Anonymous
    15 years ago
    Just a few notes on how one can use htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() to filter user input on forms for later display and/or database storage...

    1. Use htmlspecialchars() to filter text input values for html input tags. i.e.,

    echo '<input name=userdata type=text value="'.htmlspecialchars($data).'" />';


    2. Use htmlentities() to filter the same data values for most other kinds of html tags, i.e.,

    echo '<p>'.htmlentities($data).'</p>';

    3. Use your database escape string function to filter the data for database updates & insertions, for instance, using postgresql,

    pg_query($connection,"UPDATE datatable SET datavalue='".pg_escape_string($data)."'");


    This strategy seems to work well and consistently, without restricting anything the user might like to type and display, while still providing a good deal of protection against a wide variety of html and database escape sequence injections, which might otherwise be introduced through deliberate and/or accidental input of such character sequences by users submitting their input data via html forms.
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    5
    Anonymous
    15 years ago
    This may seem obvious, but it caused me some frustration. If you try and use htmlspecialchars with the $charset argument set and the string you run it on is not actually the same charset you specify, you get any empty string returned without any notice/warning/error.

    <?php

    $ok_utf8     = "A valid UTF-8 string";
    $bad_utf8 = "An invalid UTF-8 string";

    var_dump(htmlspecialchars($bad_utf8, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')); // string(0) ""

    var_dump(htmlspecialchars($ok_utf8, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')); // string(20) "A valid UTF-8 string"

    ?>

    So make sure your charsets are consistent

    <?php

    $bad_utf8     = "An invalid UTF-8 string";

    // make sure it's really UTF-8
    $bad_utf8 = mb_convert_encoding($bad_utf8, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($bad_utf8));

    var_dump(htmlspecialchars($bad_utf8, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')); // string(23) "An invalid UTF-8 string"

    ?>

    I had this problem because a Mac user was submitting posts copy/pasted from a program and it contained weird chars in it.
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    4
    php dot net at orakio dot net
    16 years ago
    I was recently exploring some code when I saw this being used to make data safe for "SQL".

    This function should not be used to make data SQL safe (although to prevent phishing it is perfectly good).

    Here is an example of how NOT to use this function:

    <?php
    $username     = htmlspecialchars(trim("$_POST[username]"));

    $uniqueuser = $realm_db->query("SELECT `login` FROM `accounts` WHERE `login` = '$username'");
    ?>

    (Only other check on $_POST['username'] is to make sure it isn't empty which it is after trim on a white space only name)

    The problem here is that it is left to default which allows single quote marks which are used in the sql query. Turning on magic quotes might fix it but you should not rely on magic quotes, in fact you should never use it and fix the code instead. There are also problems with \ not being escaped. Even if magic quotes were used there would be the problem of allowing usernames longer than the limit and having some really weird usernames given they are to be used outside of html, this just provide a front end for registering to another system using mysql. Of course using it on the output wouldn;t cause that problem.

    Another way to make something of a fix would be to use ENT_QUOTE or do:

    <?php
    $uniqueuser     = $realm_db->query('SELECT `login` FROM `accounts` WHERE `login` = "'.$username.'";');
    ?>

    Eitherway none of these solutions are good practice and are not entirely unflawed. This function should simply never be used in such a fashion.

    I hope this will prevent newbies using this function incorrectly (as they apparently do).
    up
    3
    ryan at ryano dot net
    23 years ago
    Actually, if you're using >= 4.0.5, this should theoretically be quicker (less overhead anyway):

    $text = str_replace(array("&gt;", "&lt;", "&quot;", "&amp;"), array(">", "<", "\"", "&"), $text);
    up
    2
    PoV
    9 years ago
    Be aware of the encoding of your source files!!!

    Some of the suggestions here make reference to workarounds where you hard-code an encoding.

    <?php
    echo htmlspecialchars('<b>Wörmann</b>'); // Why isn't this working?
    ?>

    As it turns out, it may actually be your text editor that is to blame.

    As of PHP 5.4, htmlspecialchars now defaults to the UTF-8 encoding. That said, many text editors default to non-UTF encodings like ISO-8859-1 (i.e. Latin-1) or WIN-1252. If you change the encoding of the file to UTF-8, the code above will now work (i.e. the ö is encoded differently in UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, and you need the UTF-8 version).

    Make sure you are editing in UTF-8 Unicode mode! Check your UI or manual for how to convert files to Unicode. It's also a good idea to figure out where to look in your UI to see what the current file encoding is.
    up
    1
    minder at ufive dot unibe dot ch
    11 years ago
    Problem

    In many PHP legacy products the function htmlspecialchars($string) is used to convert characters like < and > and quotes a.s.o to HTML-entities. That avoids the interpretation of HTML Tags and asymmetric quote situations.

    Since PHP 5.4 for $string in htmlspecialchars($string) utf8 characters are expected if no charset is defined explicitly as third parameter in the function. Legacy products are mostly in Latin1 (alias iso-8859-1) what makes the functions htmlspecialchars(), htmlentites() and html_entity_decode() to return empty strings if a special character, e. g. a German Umlaut, is present in $string:

    PHP<5.4

    echo htmlspecialchars('<b>Woermann</b>') //Output: &lt;b&gt;Woermann&lt;b&gt;
    echo htmlspecialchars('Wörmann') //Output: &lt;b&gt;Wörmann&lt;b&gt;

    PHP=5.4

    echo htmlspecialchars('<b>Woermann</b>') //Output: &lt;b&gt;Woermann&lt;b&gt;
    echo htmlspecialchars('<b>Wörmann</b>') //Output: empty

    Three alternative solutions

    a) Not runnig legacy products on PHP 5.4
    b) Change all find spots in your code from
    htmlspecialchars($string) and *** to
    htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'ISO-8859-1')
    c) Replace all htmlspecialchars() and *** with a new self-made function

    *** The same is true for htmlentities() and html_entity_decode();

    Solution c

    1 Make Search and Replace in the concerned legacy project:
    Search for: htmlspecialchars
    Replace with: htmlXspecialchars
    Search for: htmlentities
    Replace with: htmlXentities
    Search for: html_entity_decode
    Replace with: htmlX_entity_decode
    2a Copy and paste the following three functions into an existing already everywhere included PHP-file in your legacy project. (of course that PHP-file must be included only once per request, otherwise you will get a Redeclare Function Fatal Error).

    function htmlXspecialchars($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return htmlspecialchars($string, $ent, $charset);
    }

    function htmlXentities($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return htmlentities($string, $ent, $charset);
    }

    function htmlX_entity_decode($string, $ent=ENT_COMPAT, $charset='ISO-8859-1') {
    return html_entity_decode($string, $ent, $charset);
    }

    or 2b crate a new PHP-file containing the three functions mentioned above, let's say, z. B. htmlXfunctions.inc.php and include it on the first line of every PHP-file in your legacy product like this: require_once('htmlXfunctions.inc.php').
    up
    0
    nachitox2000 [at] hotmail [dot] com
    14 years ago
    I had problems with spanish special characters. So i think in using htmlspecialchars but my strings also contain HTML.
    So I used this :) Hope it help

    <?php
    function htmlspanishchars($str)
    {
    return     str_replace(array("&lt;", "&gt;"), array("<", ">"), htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_NOQUOTES, "UTF-8"));
    }
    ?>
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    -4
    solar-energy
    17 years ago
    also see function "urlencode()", useful for passing text with ampersand and other special chars through url

    (i.e. the text is encoded as if sent from form using GET method)

    e.g.

    <?php
    echo "<a href='foo.php?text=".urlencode("foo?&bar!")."'>link</a>";
    ?>

    produces

    <a href='foo.php?text=foo%3F%26bar%21'>link</a>

    and if the link is followed, the $_GET["text"] in foo.php will contain "foo?&bar!"
    up
    -3
    _____ at luukku dot com
    22 years ago
    People, don't use ereg_replace for the most simple string replacing operations (replacing constant string with another).
    Use str_replace.
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