(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
htmlspecialchars — Convert special characters to HTML entities
$string,$flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401,$encoding = null,$double_encode = trueCertain characters have special significance in HTML, and should be represented by HTML entities if they are to preserve their meanings. This function returns a string with these conversions made. If you require all input substrings that have associated named entities to be translated, use htmlentities() instead.
If the input string passed to this function and the final document share the same character set, this function is sufficient to prepare input for inclusion in most contexts of an HTML document. If, however, the input can represent characters that are not coded in the final document character set and you wish to retain those characters (as numeric or named entities), both this function and htmlentities() (which only encodes substrings that have named entity equivalents) may be insufficient. You may have to use mb_encode_numericentity() instead.
| Character | Replacement |
|---|---|
& (ampersand) |
& |
" (double quote) |
", unless ENT_NOQUOTES is set |
' (single quote) |
' (for ENT_HTML401) or ' (for
ENT_XML1, ENT_XHTML or
ENT_HTML5), but only when
ENT_QUOTES is set
|
< (less than) |
< |
> (greater than) |
> |
stringThe string being converted.
flags
A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify how to handle quotes,
invalid code unit sequences and the used document type. The default is
ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.
| Constant Name | Description |
|---|---|
ENT_COMPAT |
Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone. |
ENT_QUOTES |
Will convert both double and single quotes. |
ENT_NOQUOTES |
Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted. |
ENT_IGNORE |
Silently discard invalid code unit sequences instead of returning an empty string. Using this flag is discouraged as it » may have security implications. |
ENT_SUBSTITUTE |
Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (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 � (otherwise) instead of leaving them as is. This may be useful, for instance, to ensure the well-formedness of XML documents with embedded external content. |
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. |
encodingAn optional argument defining the encoding used when converting characters.
If omitted, encoding defaults to the value of the
default_charset configuration
option.
Although this argument is technically optional, you are highly encouraged to specify the correct value for your code if the default_charset configuration option may be set incorrectly for the given input.
For the purposes of this function, the encodings
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15,
UTF-8, cp866,
cp1251, cp1252, and
KOI8-R are effectively equivalent, provided the
string itself is valid for the encoding, as
the characters affected by htmlspecialchars() occupy
the same positions in all of these encodings.
The following character sets are supported:
| Charset | Aliases | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ISO-8859-1 | ISO8859-1 | Western European, Latin-1. |
| ISO-8859-5 | ISO8859-5 | Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic). |
| ISO-8859-15 | 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 | ibm866, 866 | DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. |
| cp1251 | Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 | Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. |
| cp1252 | Windows-1252, 1252 | Windows specific charset for Western European. |
| KOI8-R | koi8-ru, koi8r | Russian. |
| BIG5 | 950 | Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan. |
| GB2312 | 936 | Simplified Chinese, national standard character set. |
| BIG5-HKSCS | Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese. | |
| Shift_JIS | SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 | Japanese |
| EUC-JP | 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 (see nl_langinfo() and setlocale()), in this order. Not recommended. |
Note: Any other character sets are not recognized. The default encoding will be used instead and a warning will be emitted.
double_encode
When double_encode is turned off PHP will not
encode existing html entities, the default is to convert everything.
The converted string.
If the input string contains an invalid code unit
sequence within the given encoding an empty string
will be returned, unless either the ENT_IGNORE or
ENT_SUBSTITUTE flags are set.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 8.1.0 |
flags changed from ENT_COMPAT to ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.
|
Example #1 htmlspecialchars() example
<?php
$new = htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_QUOTES);
echo $new; // <a href='test'>Test</a>
?>Note:
Note that this function does not translate anything beyond what is listed above. For full entity translation, see htmlentities().
Note:
In case of an ambiguous
flagsvalue, the following rules apply:
- When neither of
ENT_COMPAT,ENT_QUOTES,ENT_NOQUOTESis present, the default isENT_NOQUOTES.- When more than one of
ENT_COMPAT,ENT_QUOTES,ENT_NOQUOTESis present,ENT_QUOTEStakes the highest precedence, followed byENT_COMPAT.- When neither of
ENT_HTML401,ENT_HTML5,ENT_XHTML,ENT_XML1is present, the default isENT_HTML401.- When more than one of
ENT_HTML401,ENT_HTML5,ENT_XHTML,ENT_XML1is present,ENT_HTML5takes the highest precedence, followed byENT_XHTML,ENT_XML1andENT_HTML401.- When more than one of
ENT_DISALLOWED,ENT_IGNORE,ENT_SUBSTITUTEare present,ENT_IGNOREtakes the highest precedence, followed byENT_SUBSTITUTE.