htmlentities and htmlspecialchars refuse to process string

Question

Since the last update to PHP5 5.4.0-3 on my Debian box I noticed that some pages have empty fields where text from the MySQL database should be.

I played around a bit and found the problem.

<?php
$scselect = mysql_query("SELECT `name` FROM `forum_threads` WHERE `forum` = '1' ORDER BY `timestamp` DESC") or exit((mysql_error()));
    while ($scrow=mysql_fetch_array($scselect))
    {
        var_dump($scrow['name']);
        var_dump(htmlentities($scrow['name']));
    }
?>

strangely this is whats printed:

string(18) "php hu3: the Forum"
string(0) ""
string(18) "php hu2 score-rule"
string(0) ""
string(6) "php hu"
string(0) ""
string(15) "HU 8: Binarycnt"
string(0) ""

but if I use htmlentities with hardcoded content -> htmlentities("test"); it works like charm. Also if I do this:

var_dump("a".$scrow['name']);

it also says

string(0) ""

But it gets stranger. If I use htmlentities or htmlspecialchars with any other variable from the database it works just perfectly.

var_dump(htmlspecialchars($scrow['ID'])); // prints for example string(2) "87"

what can be the cause of this?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 07 '12 at 12:37

3

Try this :

htmlentities($scrow['name'], ENT_QUOTES | ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8");

answered Apr 07 '12 at 12:37

Dr.Kameleon

22,532
20
115
223

this seems to work.. but its killing my umlauts.. and why was this no issue before the update? – Christian Apr 07 '12 at 12:48
1

@Christian What if you use `ISO-8859-1` or `cp1252`, instead of `UTF-8`? – Dr.Kameleon Apr 07 '12 at 12:49
1

that works! thanks! is there any way to tell php that it should always use ISO-8859-1 without me having to add that to every htmlentities call? – Christian Apr 07 '12 at 14:28

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 19 '12 at 10:19

2

Recommended approach is to hard code the character set each time you use htmlentities.

This is a feature of the htmlentities call, and not affected by the default character set. migration54

edited Dec 19 '12 at 10:19

Sumit Singh

15,743
6
59
89

answered Dec 19 '12 at 10:01

user1581659

31
3

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 07 '12 at 12:43

1

the cause of this can be another encoding returned from the database (like UTF8)

so play a little around with utf8_encode($string) or utf8_decode($string)

another approach would be playing around with the encoding argument of htmlentities:

http://de2.php.net/htmlentities

answered Apr 07 '12 at 12:43

Stefan

2,028
2
36
53

its strange though that it worked a day ago. Didn't change the code nor the database – Christian Apr 07 '12 at 12:51

htmlentities and htmlspecialchars refuse to process string

3 Answers3