Question

I have a HTML file and when I view it in notepad, I can see the following:

<p><span>Copyright © 2008 Your Company Name</span>

Notice the copyright symbol:

I load the HTML and perform this on it:

$html = file_get_contents('test.html');
$html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
file_put_contents('output.html', $html);

When I view the html again in notepad, the copyright symbol has disappeared and is replaced by a space?!

I want the copyright symbol to be replaced by a © or &#169. Is this not what mb_convert_encoding with the HTML-ENTITIES option does?

This is the test HTML file I am using.

Answer 1

Your test HTML page is not encoded in UTF-8; therefore, when mb_convert_encoding sees the copyright character (ordinal value 169) it doesn’t know what to do with what it perceives as an invalid UTF-8 sequence.

You should therefore specify the correct input encoding when calling mb_convert_encoding:

$html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'ISO-8859-1');

Alternatively, you can use something like

$html = htmlentities($html, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'ISO-8859-1');

Note: I am answering your question directly, but you don’t say what you need the conversion for. It’s possible that there may be a better way to achieve your goal.