Question

I am making a website where one fills out a form and it creates a PDF. The user will be able to put in diacritic and special characters. The way I am sending the characters to the PHP, those characters will come into the PHP as HTML coded characters i.e. à. I need to change this to whatever it is PHP will read so when I put it through the PDF maker we have it has the diacritic character and not the HTML code for it.

I wrote a test to try this out but I haven’t been able to figure it out. If I have to I will end up writing an array for every possible character they can use and translate the incoming string but I am trying to find an easier solution.

Here is the code of my test:

$title = "Test of Title for use With This Project and it should also wrap because it is sò long!  Acutally it is even longer than previously expected!";
$ti = htmlspecialchars_decode($title);

I have been attempting to use the htmlspecialchars_decode() to convert it but it still comes out as &ograve and not ò. Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

Use the html_entity_decode function instead of htmlspecialchars_decode (which only decodes entities such as &, ", < and > = special HTML chars, not all entities).