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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T09:21:30+00:00

I am trying to convert all   instances to regular spaces in PHP: echo

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I am trying to convert all   instances to regular spaces in PHP:

echo '<meta charset="UTF-8" /> ';
echo html_entity_decode('&nbsp;');
echo html_entity_decode('&nbsp;', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

If the first line is commented out, then the output will be in ISO 8859-1 and read:

 Â

Where there is a space in front. If UTF-8 encoding is specified, it reads:

�

Which is an undefined UTF-8 character followed by a space. Is there anyway to ensure that all HTML entity spaces are correctly decoded regardless of the encoding?

The space character is really just an example, what I am trying to do is read html input from an unspecified charset and display it. So < and &#60; would both become <.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is problem with encodings. They are not compatible. You have to use different options in html_entity_decode for every encoding. However, You may convert input to utf-8 (iconv) first and use html_entity_decode($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8') later.

    If You don’t know the encoding of input, You have to guess.

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