How to display special characters in PHP

Question

I ve seen this asked several times  but not with a good resolution  I have the following string    string     lt p gt R  sum   lt  p gt      I want to print or echo the string  but the output will return  lt p gt R sum  lt  p gt   So I try htmlspecialchars   or htmlentities   which outputs  amp lt p amp gt R amp eacute sum amp eacute  amp lt p amp gt  and the browser renders  amp lt p amp gt R amp eacute sum amp eacute  amp lt p amp gt   I want it  obviously  to render this      R  sum     And I m using UTF-8   header  Content-type  text html  charset UTF-8      What am I missing here  Why do echo and print output a   for any special character  To clarify  the string is actually an entire HTML file stored in a database  The real-world application is not just that one small line

User · Accepted Answer

After much banging-head-on-table  I have a bit better understanding of the issue that I wanted to post for anyone else who may have had this issue  While the UTF-8 character set will display special characters on the client  the server  on the other hand  may not be so accomodating and would print special characters such as    and    as   and    To make sure your server will print them correctly  use the ISO-8859-1 charset   lt  php       Just for your server-side code       header  Content-Type  text html  charset ISO-8859-1      gt   lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html gt       lt head gt           lt meta charset  quot utf-8 quot  gt  lt  -- Your HTML file can still use UTF-8-- gt           lt title gt Untitled Document lt  title gt       lt  head gt       lt body gt           lt     quot      quot    gt       lt  body gt   lt  html gt   This will print correctly        Edit  4 years later   I have a little better understanding now  The reason this works is that the client  browser  is being told  through the response header    to expect an ISO-8859-1 text html file   As others have mentioned  you can also do this by updating your  ini or  htaccess files   Then  once the browser begins to parse that given file into the DOM  the output will obey any  lt meta charset  quot  quot  gt  rule but keep your ISO characters intact

User · Answer

The following worked for me when having a similar issue lately    str   iconv  iso-8859-15    utf-8    str

User · Answer

This works for me   Create edit  htaccess file with these lines   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 AddCharset UTF-8  php   If you prefer create edit php ini   default charset    utf-8    Sources    https   stackoverflow com a 6989559 496176 https   stackoverflow com a 1610475 496176

User · Answer

This works for me  Try this one before the start of HTML  I hope it will also work for you    x000D   x000D   lt  php header  Content-Type  text html  charset iso-8859-15      gt  x000D   lt  DOCTYPE html gt  x000D   x000D   lt html lang  en-US  gt  x000D   lt head gt  x000D   x000D   x000D

User · Answer

One of the best ways to do this is  change Collation in my SQL database  step 1  Go to the Mysql database step 2  Select the Text-based Row you want to get displayed  Eg   post or comments  step 3  edit the row and select collation as below  utf8mb4 unicode ci  Make sure to change the collation of text rows whichever you want to display the special characters  Sometimes htmlspecialchars decode   or any other entity   doesn t convert your special chars to normal  So  the above method will definitely help

User · Answer

So I try htmlspecialchars   or htmlentities   which outputs    lt p gt R eacute sum eacute  lt p gt  and the browser renders    lt p gt R  sum   lt p gt     If you ve got it working where it displays R  sum   with  lt p gt  lt  p gt  tags around it  then just don t convert the paragraph  only your string  Then the paragraph will be rendered as HTML and your string will be displayed within

User · Answer

Try This  Input    lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html gt   lt body gt    lt  php  str    This is some  lt b gt bold lt  b gt  text    echo htmlspecialchars  str     gt    lt p gt Converting  amp lt  and  amp gt  into entities are often used to prevent browsers from using it as an HTML element   lt br   gt This can be especially useful to prevent code from running when users have access to display input on your homepage  lt  p gt    lt  body gt   lt  html gt    Output   This is some  lt b gt bold lt  b gt  text   Converting  lt  and  gt  into entities are often used to prevent browsers from using it as an HTML element  This can be especially useful to prevent code from running when users have access to display input on your homepage

User · Answer

In PHP there is a pretty good function utf8 encode   to solve this issue   echo utf8 encode  R  sum         will output R  sum   instead of R sum    Check the official PHP page

User · Answer

You can have a mix of PHP and HTML in your PHP files    just do something like this      lt  php  string   htmlentities  R  sum        gt    lt html gt   lt head gt  lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt p gt  lt     string   gt  lt  p gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt    That should output R  sum   just how you want it to   If you don t have short tags enabled  replace the  lt     string   gt  with  lt  php echo  string    gt

User · Answer

str    Is your name O  vins        Outputs  Is your name O vins  echo stripslashes  str

[php] How to display special characters in PHP

Edit (4 years later):

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