htmlspecialchars / htmlentities - Can't get to work

[eddie]

Hello again

I am having trouble converting special characters when a form is submitted. These include symbols like 'é'. I have tried using the php functions: htmlspecialchars and htmlentities, but these don't produce my desired result.

Below are the two results of using the php functions above to convert 'Rosé Wine':

Using htmlspecialchars

$value = "Rosé Wine";
echo htmlspecialchars($value); // Output: Rosé Wine

Using htmlentities

$value = "Rosé Wine";
echo htmlentities($value); // Output: Rosé Wine

Using str_replace

$value = "Rosé Wine";
echo str_replace("é","é",$value); // Output: Rosé Wine


As you can see this is not what i am looking for, below is the output that i am after.

Using some magical php function that google cannot help me find

$value = "Rosé Wine";
echo cleverfunction($value); // Output: Rosé Wine


Also i would prefer not to have to create a custom made function as there maybe characters that i miss.

Do you know how to do this?

Thankyou very much!!

Eddie

[webman]

Hi Eddie

Using htmlentities() does produce é for me. Have you tried specifying a character set in the third parameter?

[eddie]

Hello,

Thanks a lot, you were right!


Just to clarify for anyone else who has this problem...

I tried the top three character sets and nelow is the results:

$value = "Rosé Wine";

echo htmlentities($value, ENT_QUOTES, "ISO8859-1"); // Output: Rosé Wine
echo htmlentities($value, ENT_QUOTES, "ISO8859-15"); // Output: Rosé Wine
echo htmlentities($value, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"); // Output: Rosé Wine

So you need to set the character set to UTF-8:

echo htmlentities($value, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");

[webman]

Pleased you got it working

It must be down to the character encoding of the string that is being passed to the function. I used AltGr+E to get the accent and pasted it into a text editor and ISO-8859-1 worked OK, whereas UTF-8 did nothing at all. In your case it's obviously different, but at least it works

[Marci]

You can define UTF-8 for HTML content pagewide by dropping...

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

...into the header of all your pages, and ensuring when you create MySQL databases that you also specify UTF-8 charset.

To make it the default charset for php, head to php.ini on your webserver, and look for...

default_charset =

...and set it to UTF-8 also. But be prepared to change it back as it may break some session calls unless you reinstall the webapp that is calling them.