Question

I have some HTML data (over which I have no control, can only read it) that contains a lot of Scandinavian characters (å, ä, ö, æ, ø, etc.). These “special” chars are stored as HTML character numbers (æ = æ). I need to convert these to the corresponding actual character in PHP (or JavaScript but I guess PHP is better here…). Seems like html_entity_decode() only handles the “other” kind of entities, where æ = &#aelig;. The only solution I’ve come up with so far is to make a conversion table and map each character number to a real character, but that’s not really super smart…
So, any ideas? 😉

Cheers,
Christofer

Answer 1

I think html_entity_decode() should work just fine. What happens when you try:

echo html_entity_decode('æ', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');