htmlspecialchars is dropping characters

Question

I'm trying to use htmlspecialchars but it doesn't seem to be working. I'm using OSX 10.9.1 and PHP 5.4.17. I write:

var_dump(htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
echo htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_XHTML, 'UTF-8');

and get:

string '<a href='test'>Test</a>' (length=45)
<a href='test'>Test</a

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It works, but you expect something else.

The output is interpreted by your browser as HTML. You can get the plain output by setting the content type to plain or using a command line.

<?php

header('Content-Type: text/plain');

var_dump(htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
echo htmlspecialchars("<a href='test'>Test</a>", ENT_XHTML, 'UTF-8');