PHP special chars to html entity codes

Question

I am trying to convert the special chars in my array to html entity codes:

this is my helper array:

'specialChars' => [
    '!', '"', '#', '$', '%', '&', "'", '(', ')', '*', '+',
    ',', '/', ':', ';', '<', '=', '>', '?', '@', '[', '\\',
    ']', '^', '_', '`', '{', '|', '}', '§', '©', '¶'
]

And this is the function:

    public static function convert($specialChars = [])
    {
        $htmlEntityArray = [];

        if(count($specialChars) == 0)
        {
            $specialChars = Config::get('constants.specialChars'); // gets the special char from the helper array
        }

        foreach ($specialChars as $key => $value)
        {
            $htmlEntityArray = array_map("htmlentities", $specialChars);
        }

        return $htmlEntityArray;
    }

But that only returns me this array, it convert some successfully and some not:

array:32 [▼
  0 => "!"
  1 => "&quot;"
  2 => "#"
  3 => "$"
  4 => "%"
  5 => "&amp;"
  6 => "'"
  7 => "("
  8 => ")"
  9 => "*"
  10 => "+"
  11 => ","
  12 => "/"
  13 => ":"
  14 => ";"
  15 => "&lt;"
  16 => "="
  17 => "&gt;"
  18 => "?"
  19 => "@"
  20 => "["
  21 => "\"
  22 => "]"
  23 => "^"
  24 => "_"
  25 => "`"
  26 => "{"
  27 => "|"
  28 => "}"
  29 => "&sect;"
  30 => "&copy;"
  31 => "&para;"
]

why not just use php's htmlentities or htmlspecialchars functions, which are made to do this — Jelmergu
– Jelmergu, Commented May 31, 2017 at 8:43

Ethan · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-31 08:55:00Z

4

You have to use the ENT_QUOTES and ENT_HTML5 flags.

$specialChars = [
    '!', '"', '#', '$', '%', '&', "'", '(', ')', '*', '+',
    ',', '/', ':', ';', '<', '=', '>', '?', '@', '[', '\\',
    ']', '^', '_', '`', '{', '|', '}', '§', '©', '¶'
];

var_export(array_map(function ($str) { return htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5); }, $specialChars));

This returns:

array (
    0 => '&excl;',
    1 => '&quot;',
    2 => '&num;',
    3 => '&dollar;',
    4 => '&percnt;',
    5 => '&amp;',
    6 => '&apos;',
    7 => '&lpar;',
    8 => '&rpar;',
    9 => '&ast;',
    10 => '&plus;',
    11 => '&comma;',
    12 => '&sol;',
    13 => '&colon;',
    14 => '&semi;',
    15 => '&lt;',
    16 => '&equals;',
    17 => '&gt;',
    18 => '&quest;',
    19 => '&commat;',
    20 => '&lbrack;',
    21 => '&bsol;',
    22 => '&rsqb;',
    23 => '&Hat;',
    24 => '&lowbar;',
    25 => '&grave;',
    26 => '&lbrace;',
    27 => '&vert;',
    28 => '&rcub;',
    29 => '&sect;',
    30 => '&copy;',
    31 => '&para;',
)

answered May 31, 2017 at 8:55

Ethan

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2 Comments

utdev Over a year ago

How would I need to edit the function to make something like this avaible: Menu::convert('my name?'); And to get as an output my name&quest;

Ethan Over a year ago

Don't use a method, just call htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5) @utdev. I suppose you could use a method if this was called in lots of places though.

UfguFugullu · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-31 09:50:13Z

2

You have to use the second parameter "flag" of htmlentities like this

$htmlEntityArray = array_map(function($char) {
  return htmlentities($char, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5);
}, $specialChars);

edited May 31, 2017 at 9:50

answered May 31, 2017 at 8:50

UfguFugullu

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1 Comment

utdev Over a year ago

ENT_HTML5 did not show all I need ENT_QUOTES aswell

Álvaro González · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-31 09:07:54Z

Note: I didn't check the entity list, thus didn't notice that all characters have translations available. I'm leaving the answer though in case it can help others with a different list of characters.

From docs (emphasis mine):

all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.

See Also

get_html_translation_table() - Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities

In other situations you could have a better result with mb_convert_encoding() using HTML-ENTITIES as target encoding. The problem is that there isn't an obvious pattern in your entities (most of them are basic US-ASCII characters that do not have any special meaning in HTML, thus don't need to be converted to HTML entities for any of the usual reasons). So you're left two options:

Generate a numeric entity with the help of e.g. preg_replace_callback() and pack().
Hard-code the complete entity list and get replacements done with strtr().

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