Question

I’m building a small parser that scrapes web pages and logs the data on them. One of the things to log is the post title of forums. I’m using a XML parser to look through the DOM and get this information, and I’m storing it like this:

// Strip out the post's title
$title = $page->find('a[rel=bookmark]', 0);
$title = htmlspecialchars_decode(html_entity_decode(trim($title->plaintext)));

This works for the most part, but some posts have certain special HTML character codes like – which is dash (-). How would I go about converting these special character codes back into their original strings?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use html_entity_decode. Here’s a quick example.

$string = "hyphenated&#8211words";

$new = html_entity_decode($string);

echo $new;

You should see…

hyphenated–words