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phppreg-replacestr-replacehtmlspecialchars

htmlspecialchars is not working as I want! I want < to be gt, NOT &gt;

This is my input:

<

This is the output I need:

gt

But this is the output I GET from htmlspecialchars:

&gt;

Basically, I want htmlspecialchars result, but really stripped down. I only want characters a-z and 0-9.

Can anyone help?

Solution

  • This should work for you:

    (Just preg_replace() all characters which aren't in a-z0-9 with an empty string which you get from htmlentities())

    <?php

    $str = "<";
    echo preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9]/", "", htmlentities($str));

?>

    output:

    lt