html_entity_decode Convert all HTML entities to their applicable characters stringhtml_entity_decode stringstring intquote_style stringcharset html_entity_decode is the opposite of htmlentities in that it converts all HTML entities to their applicable characters from string. 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 with the default being ENT_COMPAT: 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. The ISO-8859-1 character set is used as default for the optional third charset. This defines the character set used in conversion. &reference.strings.charsets; This function doesn't support multi-byte character sets in PHP < 5. 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 ?> ]]> 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. See also htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, get_html_translation_table, and urldecode.