PHP htmlspecialchars() Function

February 6, 2021 6:33 pm IST

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PHP htmlspecialchars()

The htmlspecialchars() function converts special characters to HTML entities.

The pre-defined characters are:

& (ampersand) becomes &
" (double quote) becomes "
' (single quote) becomes '
< (less than) becomes <
> (greater than) becomes >

Tips: If you require all input substrings that have associated named entities to be translated, use htmlentities() instead.

Example

PHP Compiler

<?php $str = "This is underline."; echo htmlspecialchars($str) . " "; echo ($str); ?>

Output

This is underline. This is underline.

Syntax

htmlspecialchars(str, flag, character-set, double_encode)

Parameter Values

Value	Type	Explanation
str	Required	Specifies the input string.
flag	Optional	Specifies how to handle quotes, invalid code unit sequences and the used document type. Possible Values: ENT_COMPAT - Table will contain entities for double-quotes, but not for single-quotes. ENT_QUOTES - Table will contain entities for both double and single quotes. ENT_NOQUOTES - Table will neither contain entities for single quotes nor for double quotes. ENT_SUBSTITUTE - Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or &#FFFD; (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 &#FFFD; (otherwise) instead of leaving them as is. ENT_HTML5 - Handle code as HTML 5. ENT_HTML401 - Handle code as HTML 4.01. ENT_XML1 - Handle code as XML 1. ENT_XHTML - Handle code as XHTML. Default value is ENT_COMPAT.
character-set	Optional	Specifies the character-set to be used when converting characters. Possible Values: ISO-8859-1 - Western European, Latin-1. ISO-8859-5 - Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic). ISO-8859-15 - 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 - 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, Traditional Chinese. Shift_JIS - Japanese EUC-JP - Japanese MacRoman - Charset that was used by Mac OS. Default value is 'UTF-8' (PHP 5.4.0 and above).
double_encode	Optional	Specifies whether to encode existing html entities or not. TRUE - Will convert everything FALSE - Will not encode existing html entities Default value is TRUE.