Question

I need to print an HTML tag on screen as texts (and not in code).

I need the readers to literally read the tag.

What is the best practice to do so ?

print htmlspecialchars('<meta name="copyright" content="© Winston Smith, 1984">');

or

print htmlentities('<meta name="copyright" content="© Winston Smith, 1984">');

or none of the above.

• Is there a better way?
• What else should I consider ?
• And last question – should I use print, echo or is there no
  difference ?

*EDIT I*

I already seen a problem with the character “©” with htmlentities().
This only confirms my doubts – which one is safe to use for all cases – and is there another way to print html tags as text ?

Answer 1

Basically all you really need to make HTML readable as text is:

$out = strtr($input,Array("<"=>"&lt;","&"=>"&amp;"));

htmlspecialchars is basically a subset of htmlentities. htmlentities encodes EVERYTHING that has an entity alternative, namely all the named entities and a handful of codes.