Learn how to use php htmlspecialchars() function
Certain characters have special significance in HTML, and should be represented by HTML entities if they are to preserve their meanings. This function returns a string with these conversions made. If you require all input substrings that have associated named entities to be translated, use htmlentities() .
Syntax
string htmlspecialchars ( string $string [, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401 [, string $encoding = 'UTF-8' [, bool $double_encode = true ]]] )
Description
The htmlspecialchars() function converts some predefined characters to HTML entities.
The predefined characters are:
- & (ampersand) becomes &
- ” (double quote) becomes "
- ‘ (single quote) becomes '
- < (less than) becomes <
- > (greater than) becomes >
htmlspecialchars(string,quotestyle,character-set)
Here,
string : Required. Specifies the string to convert
quotestyle : Optional. Specifies how to encode single and double quotes.
The available quote styles are:
ENT_COMPAT – Default. Encodes only double quotes
ENT_QUOTES – Encodes double and single quotes
ENT_NOQUOTES – Does not encode any quotes
character-set : Optional. A string that specifies which character-set to use.
Allowed values are:
ISO-8859-1 – Default. Western European
ISO-8859-15 – Western European (adds the Euro sign + French and Finnish letters missing in ISO-8859-1)
UTF-8 – ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode
cp866 – DOS-specific Cyrillic charset
cp1251 – Windows-specific Cyrillic charset
cp1252 – Windows specific charset for Western European
KOI8-R – Russian
BIG5 – Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan
GB2312 – Simplified Chinese, national standard character set
BIG5-HKSCS – Big5 with Hong Kong extensions
Shift_JIS – Japanese
EUC-JP – Japanese
- <?php
- $str = htmlspecialchars(“<a href=’test’>Test</a>”, ENT_QUOTES);
- echo $str;
- // Outputs: <a href='test'>Test</a>
- ?>