# html_entity_decode

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)

html_entity_decode — Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters

### Description

string html_entity_decode ( string `$string` [, int `$quote_style` [, string `$charset` ]] )

html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from `string` .

### Parameters

`string`

  The input string.

`quote_style`

  The optional second `quote_style` parameter lets you define what will be done with 'single' and "double" quotes. It takes on one of three constants with the default being `ENT_COMPAT`:

  Available `quote_style` constants
  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.

`charset`

  The ISO-8859-1 character set is used as default for the optional third `charset` . This defines the character set used in conversion.

  Following character sets are supported in PHP 4.3.0 and later.

  Supported charsets
  Charset | Aliases | Description
  --- | --- | ---
  ISO-8859-1 | ISO8859-1 | Western European, Latin-1
  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. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
  cp1251 | Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 | Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
  cp1252 | Windows-1252, 1252 | Windows specific charset for Western European.
  KOI8-R | koi8-ru, koi8r | Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2.
  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, 932 | Japanese
  EUC-JP | EUCJP | Japanese

  > Note: Any other character sets are not recognized and ISO-8859-1 will be used instead.

### Return Values

Returns the decoded string.

### ChangeLog

Version | Description
--- | ---
5.0.0 | Support for multi-byte character sets was added.

### Examples

Example#1 Decoding HTML entities

`<?php
$orig = "I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now";
$a = htmlentities($orig);
$b = html_entity_decode($a);
echo $a; // I'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now
echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
// For users prior to PHP 4.3.0 you may do this:
function unhtmlentities($string)
{
// replace numeric entities
$string = preg_replace('~&#x([0-9a-f]+);~ei', 'chr(hexdec("\\1"))', $string);
$string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr("\\1")', $string);
// replace literal entities
$trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
$trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl);
return strtr($string, $trans_tbl);
}
$c = unhtmlentities($a);
echo $c; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now
?>`

### Notes

> Note: You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode('&nbsp;')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the '&nbsp;' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim()) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 characterset.

### See Also

- htmlentities()
- htmlspecialchars()
- get_html_translation_table()
- urldecode()