htmlspecialchars() - string

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()
   instead.

Parameters : 
 string - The string being converted. 
 flags - A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes,
       invalid code unit sequences and the used document type. The default is
       ENT_COMPAT | 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_IGNORE

            Silently discard invalid code unit sequences instead of returning
            an empty string. Using this flag is discouraged as it
            » may have security implications.
           


ENT_SUBSTITUTE

            Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character
            U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
           


ENT_DISALLOWED

            Replace invalid code points for the given document type with a
            Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or �
            (otherwise) instead of leaving them as is. This may be useful, for
            instance, to ensure the well-formedness of XML documents with
            embedded external content.
           


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, the default value of the encoding varies
  depending on the PHP version in use. In PHP 5.6 and later, the
  default_charset configuration
  option is used as the default value. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 will use
  UTF-8 as the default. Earlier versions of PHP use
  ISO-8859-1.
 

  Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to
  specify the correct value for your code if you are using PHP 5.5 or earlier,
  or if your default_charset
  configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.
 

       For the purposes of this function, the encodings
       ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15,
       UTF-8, cp866,
       cp1251, cp1252, and
       KOI8-R are effectively equivalent, provided the
       string itself is valid for the encoding, as
       the characters affected by htmlspecialchars() occupy
       the same positions in all of these encodings.
      

 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. 
 double_encode - When double_encode is turned off PHP will not
       encode existing html entities, the default is to convert everything. 

Syntax

string htmlspecialchars
    ( string $string
   [, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401
   [, string $encoding = ini_get("default_charset")
   [, bool $double_encode = true
  ]]] )

Example

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

Output / Return Value

Limitations

Alternatives / See Also

Reference