Encoding issue, coverting & to & for html using php

php character-encoding html-entities
JMC picture JMC · Aug 18, 2010 · Viewed 37.9k times · Source

I have a url in html:

<a href="index.php?q=event&amp;id=56&amp;date=128">

I need to turn it into a string exactly as:

<a href="index.php?q=event&id=56&date=128">

I know how to do this with preg_replace etc, but is there a function in php that deals directly with encoding that I can use for other encoding issues such as &nsbp (or whatever it is, etc)? Ideally I would send my string into the function and it would output '&' instead of &amp. Is there a universal function for converting &TEXT into an actual character?

Edit: sorry, posted this before I finished typing the question. QUESTION is now complete.

Answer

Sergey Eremin picture Sergey Eremin · Aug 18, 2010

use html_entity_decode():

$newUrl = html_entity_decode('<a href="index.php?q=event&amp;id=56&amp;date=128">');
echo $newUrl; // prints <a href="index.php?q=event&id=56&date=128">

Related questions

htmlentities and é (e acute)

I'm having a problem with PHP's htmlentities and the é character. I know it's some sort of encoding issue I'm just overlooking, so hopefully someone can see what I'm doing wrong. Running a straight htmlentities("é") does not return the correct code …

Read More
Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

I'm reading out lots of texts from various RSS feeds and inserting them into my database. Of course, there are several different character encodings used in the feeds, e.g. UTF-8 and ISO 8859-1. Unfortunately, there are sometimes problems with …

Read More
PHP: Convert any string to UTF-8 without knowing the original character set, or at least try

I have an application that deals with clients from all over the world, and, naturally, I want everything going into my databases to be UTF-8 encoded. The main problem for me is that I don't know what encoding the source …

Read More