What To Do When get_html_translation_table() And htmlspecialchars() Doesn't Work

17th September 2008 - 2 minutes read time

I found a little problem today when processing a bit of text from a non-english site. I found that the text was being loaded properly, but because it was in UTF-8 encoding PHP couldn't use htmlspecialchars() or apply get_html_translation_table() to the string to properly encode the foreign characters. These methods just don't have any effect. This is because PHP (before version 5.2.x) doesn't natively support unicode character encoding and is therefore not able to translate characters in UTF-8 format.

To get around this just use the utf8_decode() function on the string to convert it into a usable format.

// convert from uft8
$string = utf8_decode($string);
 
// translate HTML entities
$trans = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
$string = strtr($string, $trans);

I hope this helps anyone having the same issue. Also, PHP6 will support unicode character encoding so this will probably have to be looked at again when PHP6 is released.

PHP

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
17 + 1 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Related Content

Recreating Spotify Wrapped In PHP

17th March 2024

I quite like the end of the year report from Spotify that they call "Wrapped". This is a little application in which they tell you what your favorite artist was and what sort of genres you listened to the most during the year.

Read more

Should A Constructor Throw An Exception?

18th February 2024

Let's say you had a class that you wanted to use, but there was some sort of error in creating the object. This might be that the wrong parameters were passed, or the third party service (eg. a database) wasn't available at the time of creation.

Read more

PHP Question: Variable Reference

10th December 2023

Question

What does the following code print out?

function arrayPrint($array)
{
   echo implode(' ', $array);
}

$arrayA = [1, 2, 3];
$arrayB = $arrayA;
$arrayB[1] = 0;
arrayPrint($arrayA);

Read more

Creating An Authentication System With PHP and MariaDB

15th October 2023

Using frameworks to handle the authentication of your PHP application is perfectly fine to do, and normally encouraged. They abstract away all of the complexity of managing users and sessions that need to work in order to allow your application to function.

Read more

Creating Sparklines In PHP

17th September 2023

A sparkline is a very small line graph that is intended to convey some simple information, usually in terms of a numeric value over time. They tend to lack axes or other labels and are added to information readouts in order to expand on numbers in order to give them more context.

Read more