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Asked: 2026-05-12T10:32:02+00:00

I want to convert all texts in a string into html entities but preserving

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I want to convert all texts in a string into html entities but preserving the HTML tags, for example this:

<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>

should be translated into this:

<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Cami&oacute;n espa&ntilde;ol</font></p>

any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can get the list of correspondances character => entity used by htmlentities, with the function get_html_translation_table ; consider this code :

    $list = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
var_dump($list);

    (You might want to check the second parameter to that function in the manual — maybe you’ll need to set it to a value different than the default one)

    It will get you something like this :

    array
  ' ' => string '&nbsp;' (length=6)
  '¡' => string '&iexcl;' (length=7)
  '¢' => string '&cent;' (length=6)
  '£' => string '&pound;' (length=7)
  '¤' => string '&curren;' (length=8)
  ....
  ....
  ....
  'ÿ' => string '&yuml;' (length=6)
  '"' => string '&quot;' (length=6)
  '<' => string '&lt;' (length=4)
  '>' => string '&gt;' (length=4)
  '&' => string '&amp;' (length=5)

    Now, remove the correspondances you don’t want :

    unset($list['"']);
unset($list['<']);
unset($list['>']);
unset($list['&']);

    Your list, now, has all the correspondances character => entity used by htmlentites, except the few characters you don’t want to encode.

    And now, you just have to extract the list of keys and values :

    $search = array_keys($list);
$values = array_values($list);

    And, finally, you can use str_replace to do the replacement :

    $str_in = '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>';
$str_out = str_replace($search, $values, $str_in);
var_dump($str_out);

    And you get :

    string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Cami&Atilde;&sup3;n espa&Atilde;&plusmn;ol</font></p>' (length=84)

    Which looks like what you wanted 😉

    Edit : well, except for the encoding problem (damn UTF-8, I suppose — I’m trying to find a solution for that, and will edit again)

    Second edit couple of minutes after : it seem you’ll have to use utf8_encode on the $search list, before calling str_replace 🙁

    Which means using something like this :

    $search = array_map('utf8_encode', $search);

    Between the call to array_keys and the call to str_replace.

    And, this time, you should really get what you wanted :

    string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Cami&oacute;n espa&ntilde;ol</font></p>' (length=70)

    And here is the full portion of code :

    $list = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
unset($list['"']);
unset($list['<']);
unset($list['>']);
unset($list['&']);

$search = array_keys($list);
$values = array_values($list);
$search = array_map('utf8_encode', $search);

$str_in = '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>';
$str_out = str_replace($search, $values, $str_in);
var_dump($str_in, $str_out);

    And the full output :

    string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>' (length=58)
string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Cami&oacute;n espa&ntilde;ol</font></p>' (length=70)

    This time, it should be ok ^^

    It doesn’t really fit in one line, is might not be the most optimized solution ; but it should work fine, and has the advantage of allowing you to add/remove any correspondance character => entity you need or not.

    Have fun !

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