Convert special characters to HTML character codes

Question

I'm developing a CMS for a customer and he needs to edit stuff and use special characters such as ç and ®. However, I don't want him to have to enter the character codes like ®. Does anyone knows a good way to automatically convert those characters using PHP?

Answer 1

You can use htmlentities() to do that.

php -r 'echo htmlentities("®ç", ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8"), "\n";'
®ç

To turn entities back to readable text, use html_entity_decode():

php -r 'echo html_entity_decode("®ç", ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8"), "\n";'
®ç

If you're not using unicode, omit the charset name or give the correct charset.