Convert ' to an apostrophe in PHP

Question

My data has many HTML entities in it (• ...etc) including '. I just want to convert it to its character equivalent.

I assumed htmlspecialchars_decode() would work, but - no luck. Thoughts?

I tried this:

echo htmlspecialchars_decode('They&apos;re here.');

But it returns: They're here.

Edit:

I've also tried html_entity_decode(), but it doesn't seem to work:

echo html_entity_decode('They&apos;re here.')

also returns: They're here.

cmbuckley · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-06T14:23:13.690

50

Since ' is not part of HTML 4.01, it's not converted to ' by default.

In PHP 5.4.0, extra flags were introduced to handle different languages, each of which includes ' as an entity.

This means you can do something like this:

echo html_entity_decode('They&apos;re here.', ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5);

You will need both ENT_QUOTES (convert single and double quotes) and ENT_HTML5 (or any language flag other than ENT_HTML401, so choose the most appropriate to your situation).

Prior to PHP 5.4.0, you'll need to use str_replace:

echo str_replace('&apos;', "'", 'They&apos;re here.');

edited Mar 06 '14 at 14:23

answered Jul 22 '11 at 14:17

cmbuckley

40,217
9
77
91

I've updated the answer for PHP 5.4.0 (props to eric.itzhak for the update). – cmbuckley Mar 06 '14 at 14:24

eric.itzhak · Answer 2 · 2014-03-06T15:07:54.670

8

There is a "right" way, without using str_replace , @cbuckley was right it's because the default for html_entity_decode is HTML 4.01, but you can set an HTML 5 parameter that will decode it.

Use it like this:

html_entity_decode($str,ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5)

edited Mar 06 '14 at 15:07

answered Mar 06 '14 at 13:42

eric.itzhak

15,752
26
89
142

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 22 '11 at 14:20

The ' entity and a lot of others are not in the PHP translation table used by html_entity_decode and htmlspecialchars_decode functions, unfortunately.

Check this comment from the PHP manual: http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-html-translation-table.php#73410

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 07 '13 at 16:45

3

This should work:

$value = "They&apos;re here.";
html_entity_decode(str_replace("&apos;","'",$value));

answered Feb 07 '13 at 16:45

Vikas Shukla

104
3

I appreciate your time, but this is the same as the already-approved answer. – Dave Feb 07 '13 at 21:27

Matthew Scharley · Answer 5 · 2011-07-22T14:26:49.123

2

What you are actually looking for is html_entity_decode().

html_entity_decode() translates all entities to characters, while htmlspecialchars_decode() only reverses what htmlspecialchars() will encode.

EDIT: Looking at the examples on the page I linked to, I did a bit more investigation and the following seems to not work:

[matt@scharley ~]$ php
<?php
$tmp = array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES));
var_dump($tmp['&apos;']);
PHP Notice:  Undefined index: &apos; in - on line 3
NULL

This is why it's not working. Why it's not in the lookup table is another question entirely, something I can't answer unfortunately.

edited Jul 22 '11 at 14:26

answered Jul 22 '11 at 14:14

Matthew Scharley

127,823
52
194
222

@Dave: Unfortuanately, you may need to roll your own... Seems like PHP doesn't support reversing `'` for some reason. See my edit for more. – Matthew Scharley Jul 22 '11 at 14:27
And it seems that was because `'` isn't part of HTML 4.01. – cmbuckley Jul 22 '11 at 14:39
@cbuckley sound like a likely reason. `'` was pulled into XHTML for compatibility with XML. – Matthew Scharley Jul 22 '11 at 14:43

score -4 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 22 '11 at 14:14

-4

Have you tried using echo htmlspecialchars('They're here.')?

I think that is what you are looking for.

answered Jul 22 '11 at 14:14

Michael Allen

5,712
3
38
63

2

I believe that's opposite of what I want. – Dave Jul 22 '11 at 14:16

Convert ' to an apostrophe in PHP

6 Answers6

Linked