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Asked: 2026-05-27T15:05:31+00:00

I was wondering, what is the best practice. To convert all utf-8 special characters

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I was wondering, what is the best practice. To convert all utf-8 special characters into HTML entities or only to escape &, < and >.

I’m working on several PHP projects. And google is displaying some wrong utf-8 results for a random part of my website.

I think this is because of one or both of the two following reasons:

  • My hosting provider didn’t automatically send the encoding headers (I already fixed this).
  • Or the fact that in the description the text was not fully escaped.

Besides that, I noticed that most of the mayor company websites don’t send the '<?xml version' line and they don’t escape their characters.

Are there downsides (or upsides) to escaping all characters vs only the minimum necessary?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Are there downsides (or upsides) to escaping all characters vs only the minimum necessary?

    Converting any characters beyond <>&"' (as done by htmlspecialchars()) is not necessary nowadays. If the page’s character set is properly configured, it is no problem to use native UTF-8 characters (or whichever character set you choose). Converting them into entities has no advantage. They are sometimes used as a misguided workaround to character set issues, but this is almost never a good idea.

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