string htmlspecialchars(string $text [, int $quoting_style [, string $characters [, bool $doubleencode] ] ])
(PHP 4 , PHP 5)
| $text | Source string to encode special HTML characters. |
|---|---|
| $quoting_style | Controls the encoding of quote characters (see below). |
| $characters | The character set to use when encoding the string (see below). |
| $doubleencode | Turn this off (pass false) to prevent the encoding from re-encoding text that has already been encoded. |
| RETURNS | The source string with HTML encodings. |
Possible values for $quoting_style
| ENT_COMPAT | Convert only double quotes and don't convert single-quotes. |
|---|---|
| ENT_QUOTES | Convert all types of quotes (both double and single). |
| ENT_NOQUOTES | Don't convert any quote characters in the source string. |
Possible Values for $characters
| ISO-8859-1 | Western European, Latin-1 |
|---|---|
| ISO-8859-15 | Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish letters missing in Latin-1(ISO-8859-1). |
| UTF-8 | ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode. |
cp866 | DOS-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. |
| cp1251 | Windows-specific Cyrillic charset. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. |
|---|---|
| cp1252 | Windows specific charset for Western European. |
| KOI8-R | Russian. This charset is supported in 4.3.2. |
| BIG5 | Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan. |
| GB2312 | Simplified Chinese, national standard character set. |
| BIG5-HKSCS | Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese. |
| Shift_JIS | Japanese |
| EUC-JP | Japanese |
This function encodes standard text as HTML encoded text. Text needs to be HTML encoded when it contains special characters that are used for HTML like angle brackets (< and >) that you don't want to be interpreted as HTML by the web browser.
This function only does basic HTML characters which are angle brackets (< and >), quotes (“ and '), and the ampersand (&). If you require a comprehensive encoding, you should use htmlentities instead.
// HTML encode text (for display in browser) echo('Encoded text: ' . htmlspecialchars($str));