html_entity_decode Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters &reftitle.description; stringhtml_entity_decode stringstring intquote_styleENT_COMPAT stringcharset'UTF-8' html_entity_decode is the opposite of htmlentities in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from string. &reftitle.parameters; string The input string. quote_style The optional second quote_style parameter lets you define what will be done with 'single' and "double" quotes. It takes on one of three constants: Constant Name Description ENT_COMPAT Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone. ENT_QUOTES Will convert both double and single quotes. ENT_NOQUOTES Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted. charset This defines the character set used in conversion. Using an empty string will activate automatic detection based on mbstring's internal encoding and current locale. &reference.strings.charsets; &reftitle.returnvalues; Returns the decoded string. &reftitle.changelog; &Version; &Description; 5.4.0 Default charset changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. 5.0.0 Support for multi-byte character sets was added. &reftitle.examples; dog now"; $a = htmlentities($orig); $b = html_entity_decode($a); echo $a; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now echo $b; // I'll "walk" the dog now // For users prior to PHP 4.3.0 you may do this: function unhtmlentities($string) { // replace numeric entities $string = preg_replace('~&#x([0-9a-f]+);~ei', 'chr(hexdec("\\1"))', $string); $string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr("\\1")', $string); // replace literal entities $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES); $trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl); return strtr($string, $trans_tbl); } $c = unhtmlentities($a); echo $c; // I'll "walk" the dog now ?> ]]> &reftitle.notes; You might wonder why trim(html_entity_decode('&nbsp;')); doesn't reduce the string to an empty string, that's because the '&nbsp;' entity is not ASCII code 32 (which is stripped by trim) but ASCII code 160 (0xa0) in the default ISO 8859-1 characterset. &reftitle.seealso; htmlentities htmlspecialchars get_html_translation_table urldecode