Blog : PHP htmlspecialchars() Function

PHP htmlspecialchars() Function

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 Complete PHP String Reference
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Definition and Usage
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 >
Syntax
htmlspecialchars(string,quotestyle,character-set)  

Parameter Description
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
 


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Tips and Notes
Note: Unrecognized character-sets will be ignored and replaced by ISO-8859-1.


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Example 1


$str = "Jane & 'Tarzan'";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_COMPAT);
echo "
";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES);
echo "
";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_NOQUOTES);
?>

 

The browser output of the code above will be:

Jane & 'Tarzan'
Jane & 'Tarzan'
Jane & 'Tarzan'  

If you select "View source" in the browser window, you will see the following HTML:



Jane & 'Tarzan'

Jane & 'Tarzan'

Jane & 'Tarzan'