Conversion of special characters in PHP

character-encoding, php, string

Solution

You need to specify the encoding for the `htmlentities` function (here UTF-8):

$formdesc = htmlentities($_POST['formdesc'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Otherwise the default value `ISO-8859-1` is used and the character `é` in your example encoded in UTF-8 as 0xC3A9 would be interpreted as two characters (`Ã` and `©`).

But why do you use `htmlentities` anyway? If you just want to escape the HTML special characters like `&`, `<`, `>`, `"` and `'` `htmlspecialchars` will suffice.

Problem

I've tried many functions already, but I simply can't figure this out. The right way, anyway. In a form field called description, I can expect all kinds of characters. These need to be formatted into HTML entities before they're submitted to the db. Now, my code: ``` $formdesc = htmlentities($_POST['formdesc'], ENT_QUOTES); ``` For a MySQL query, I simply add a "safe" function to slash the ' off the string: ``` mysql_real_escape_string($formdesc); ``` However, this sometimes doesn't work. "é," for instance, becomes é instead of é. There must be a normal function for this. Does anyone know what I mean?

Original source