Question

I have code loading in the titles of some films into the title attribute of their respective thumbnails, this format is thus:

Artist Name – ‘Song Title’

I had this code initially:

$return .= "' title='";
$return .=$video['title'];
$return .= "'>";

Obviously the first single quote was causing the title attribute to end prematurley, so I changed it to:

$return .= "' title='";
$return .= htmlspecialchars($video['title']);
$return .= "'>";

Which has had not effect at all, all the titles are still ending prematurely.

Am I misunderstanding the htmlspecialchars method?

Answer 1

http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php

By default, htmlspecialchars() does not escape single quotes (some ancient compatibility behavior). Use htmlspecialchars($video['title'], ENT_QUOTES).

You also probably should pass ‘utf-8’ as the third argument. I wrapped this deprecated behavior like this:

function htmlencode($str, $nl2br = false, $nbsp = false)
    {
    $str = htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8', true);
    if ($nbsp)
        {
        $str = str_replace(" ", ' ', $str);
        }
    if ($nl2br)
        {
        $str = nl2bruni($str);
        }
    return $str;
    }

/**
    PHP's built-in nl2br() only works with LF newlines. This version also works with CR+LF, CR and RS
*/
function nl2bruni($str)
    {
    return preg_replace('{\\r?\\n|\\r|\\x1e}', '<br />', $str);
    }