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PHP htmlspecialchars() Function

PHP String Reference Complete PHP String Reference

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 &lt;
  • > (greater than) becomes &gt;

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

Tips and Notes

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

Example 1

<html>
<body>
<?php
$str = "Jane & 'Tarzan'";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_COMPAT);
echo "<br />";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES);
echo "<br />";
echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_NOQUOTES);
?>
</body>
</html>

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:

<html>
<body>
Jane &amp; 'Tarzan'<br />
Jane &amp; &#039;Tarzan&#039;<br />
Jane &amp; 'Tarzan'
</body>
</html>

PHP String Reference Complete PHP String Reference
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