Question

I have a long string with several special characters, specifically quotes (“, ‘) and greater, less than brackets.. (<, >) and it’s messing up my HTML.

I was wondering if there was a simple way to replace all occurrences of these with their ascii equivalents (&gt; , &lt; , etc) before I spend a bunch of time writing my own function. I’m terrible at RegEx :/

Thanks for your responses.

Answer 1

There are htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars() available, depending on what you exactly need. If you only want to break ,, < and >, you can do

$new_str = htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_NOQUOTES);