answered question

1
Vote

1
Answer

M$1.00

christhomson | July 02, 2009 08:57 PM | in Web Development

How can I convert HTML entities to their actual characters in PHP?

I have a MySQL database full of data that has HTML entities in some fields. I'm pulling that data out and serving it in a format (XML) that needs those entities to be their actual symbols, not the entities. How can I convert these in PHP?

tags: entities , php , html

voted interesting: socalsue

Report

| RSS

| Share

answers (1)

0
Votes

BEST ANSWER chosen by asker | wdawe | July 02, 2009 09:34 PM

Could you provide an example? I'm not quite sure what you are referring to.

Asker's rating:

Tip wdawe for this answer | Permalink | Report

Comment

robbrown | July 02, 2009 09:52 PM

Yes... this can be done. However to answer the "How", WDawe is correct in asking for an example.

Tip robbrown for this comment | Report

christhomson | July 02, 2009 10:25 PM

I actually solved this faster than I thought I would.

I'll throw the example out there anyway for anyone who reaches this page through a search.

I had something in quotes, like so: "This is quoted." This data had to be outputted into an XML file, generated by PHP. &quot;This is quoted.&quot; was the data inside of the database -- with HTML entities instead of simple quotations.

All I had to do to display this properly, without entities (using the actual symbols) was to use the html_entity_decode function, like so:

$data = html_entity_decode($data);

I have a feeling that Mahalo will not display that properly, so if that's the case, here's a pastie of it: http://pastie.textmate.org/532635

Thanks for offering to help, though!

Tip christhomson for this comment | Report