PHP HTML Encode with Example Program

What is HTML encode PHP?

Encoding is the process of transforming reserved characters into HTML entity characters.

HTML character entities are expressed as &value;, where "value" is an abbreviation or number representing each character.

HTML provides an exhaustive set of entities. For purposes of encoding, though, we need only consider four of them:

PHP Encoding Functions

PHP provides two primary functions for encoding HTML characters.

• Htmlentities() Function
• Htmlspecialchars()

The htmlspecialchars() functions encode the four primary characters, while the htmentities() function encodes all available characters.

PHP htmlentities() Function

We shall examine the PHP htmlentities() encoding characters.

This function turns all HTML-applicable characters into HTML entities.

It is the optimal option when you need to safely parse HTML.

Syntax:

The general syntax of the function is as shown:

htmlentities( string,flags,character-set,double_encode )

Parameters

Technical Details

The function is similar to htmlspecialchars(), with the exception that it handles all possible characters by default.

In the following example, you’ll see how to use the htmlentities() function.

<?php
    $str = "<p>This is <i>valid</i> HTML code</p>";
    echo htmlentities($str);
?>

All the tags that have been turned into entities should be returned by the code above as:

<p>This is <i>valid</i> HTML code</p>

Like the htmlspecialchars() function, it supports flags and charset encoding. Find out more by looking at the documentation.

PHP htmlspecialchars()

This function turns all HTML characters that are special or reserved into HTML entities. You can tell the function what to do, but by default it will ignore single quotes.

Syntax:

htmlspecialchars( string,flags,character-set,double_encode )

Parameters:

Technical Details

The function takes a string with the HTML that needs to be encoded.

You can also give the method flag values that let you change how it works.

PHP also lets you choose which method of encoding to use for HTML entities.

The charsets that can be used are shown in the image below.

The image above is based on PHP Documentation.

The htmlspecialchars() method is shown in the next example.

<?php
    $str = "HTML uses < and > for <em>tags</em>";
    echo htmlspecialchars($str);
?>

In the above example, the HTML characters in the variable $str will be encoded.

Output:

HTML uses < and > for <em>tags</em>

You can use a flag, as shown in the example below, to tell the function to handle both single and double quotes:

<?php
    $str = "A single quote as 'and' will be ignored by default ";
    echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES);
?>

Once you run the above code, the function will process the single quotes and give an output as shown:

A single quote as 'and' will be ignored by default

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Summary

In summary, the htmlentities function and htmlspecialchars do the same thing, but htmlspecialchars handles all characters by default instead of just a few.

Now that we know how to use these functions, we can use HTML encode to make a very complicated program.

Lastly, if you want to learn more about PHP HTML Encode, please leave a comment below. We’ll be happy to hear it!