Question

I have some string with arabic encoded and ukrainian (cyrillyc) words, like this:

$string = "اِئْتِلافِيٌّ - коаліційний, гармонійний;";

and I want to get characters (arabic) instead all this “&#xxxx;”`s.

If I putting this string into html, I’m getting exactly what i want:
“اِئْتِلافِيٌّ – коаліційний, гармонійний;”

But when I use html_entitis_decode, it does nothing. (mb because arabic encoding does not supports with this function, just basic ASCII).
So, plz tell me what should I do to get same result as browser interpreter?

Answer 1

Your PHP version is probably older than 5.4.0, thus html_entity_decode is not using UTF-8.

Encoding to use. If omitted, the default value for this argument is ISO-8859-1 in versions of PHP prior to 5.4.0, and UTF-8 from PHP 5.4.0 onwards.

^{http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php}

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Try the following:

$decoded_string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, "UTF-8");

View output here on Codepad