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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