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phpstr-replacehtmlspecialchars

Characters replaced with HTML entities reappear

I am having trouble doing a simple str_replace.
I am trying to remove all comma's from a string, which does work. But when I try to alter the string again, the commas reappear somehow. I refactored my code to ensure I didn't cause this.

Anyways here is my code. Can anybody spot a bug?

 $delim=remDelim(fgets($fo));
#       echo 'before : '.htmlspecialchars($delim);
    $delime =str_replace(",",",",$delim);
    echo 'after : '.htmlspecialchars($delime);
    $delimed = str_replace("<","",$delime);
    echo $delimed.'<br />';

 example output: 
   Jose, jr to Jose&#44; jr  to  Jose, jr

Its like my string is being unconverted somehow. I would say that it was most likely I got the names mixed up and used the first string to craft the last. But alas I can see that is not the case.

Solution

  • If you're viewing this in a browser, note that the browser WILL render the character entities as the actual character, not the entity text. Either force the browser into plain-text mode (header('Content-type: text/plain');), or view the page's source (e.g. ctrl-u in firefox)