PHP html_entity_decode() Function

The PHP html_entity_decode() function converts HTML entities to their corresponding characters. This function is the opposite of htmlentities() function.

Syntax

html_entity_decode(string, flags, encoding)

Parameters

`string`	`Required.` Specify the string to decode.
`flags`	`Optional.` Specify how to handle quotes and which document type to use. The available flags constants are: ENT_COMPAT: Converts double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone. ENT_QUOTES: Converts both double and single quotes. ENT_NOQUOTES: Leaves both double and single quotes unconverted. 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. The default is ENT_COMPAT \| ENT_HTML401.
`encoding`	`Optional.` A string that specifies which character-set to use. The following character sets are supported: ISO-8859-1: (Aliases - ISO8859-1) - Western European, Latin-1. ISO-8859-5: (Aliases - ISO8859-5) - Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic). ISO-8859-15: (Aliases - 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: (Aliases - ibm866, 866) - DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. cp1251: (Aliases - Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251) - Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. cp1252: (Aliases - Windows-1252, 1252) - Windows specific charset for Western European. KOI8-R: (Aliases - koi8-ru, koi8r) - Russian. BIG5: (Aliases - 950) - Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan. GB2312: (Aliases - 936) - Simplified Chinese, national standard character set. BIG5-HKSCS: Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese. Shift_JIS: (Aliases - SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932) - Japanese EUC-JP: (Aliases - 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, in this order. It is not recommended. If omitted, encoding defaults to the value of the default_charset configuration option. "UTF-8" is the default value and its value is used as the default character encoding if the encoding parameter is omitted.

Return Value

Returns the decoded string.

Example:

The example below shows the usage of html_entity_decode() function.

<?php
$orig = "We'll \"walk\" the <b>land</b>";

$a = htmlentities($orig);

$b = html_entity_decode($a);

//returns: We'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;land&lt;/b&gt;
echo $a; 

echo "\n";

//returns: We'll "walk" the <b>land</b>
echo $b; 
?>

The output of the above code will be:

We'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;land&lt;/b&gt;
We'll "walk" the <b>land</b>

❮ PHP String Reference