get_html_translation_table

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

get_html_translation_tableReturns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities()

Description

get_html_translation_table(int $table = HTML_SPECIALCHARS, int $flags = ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401, string $encoding = "UTF-8"): array

get_html_translation_table() will return the translation table that is used internally for htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities().

Note:

Special characters can be encoded in several ways. E.g. " can be encoded as ", " or &#x22. get_html_translation_table() returns only the form used by htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities().

Parameters

table

Which table to return. Either HTML_ENTITIES or HTML_SPECIALCHARS.

flags

A bitmask of one or more of the following flags, which specify which quotes the table will contain as well as which document type the table is for. The default is ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

Available flags constants
Constant Name Description
ENT_COMPAT Table will contain entities for double-quotes, but not for single-quotes.
ENT_QUOTES Table will contain entities for both double and single quotes.
ENT_NOQUOTES Table will neither contain entities for single quotes nor for double quotes.
ENT_SUBSTITUTE Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
ENT_HTML401 Table for HTML 4.01.
ENT_XML1 Table for XML 1.
ENT_XHTML Table for XHTML.
ENT_HTML5 Table for HTML 5.

encoding

Encoding to use. If omitted, the default value for this argument is UTF-8.

The following character sets are supported:

Supported charsets
Charset Aliases Description
ISO-8859-1 ISO8859-1 Western European, Latin-1.
ISO-8859-5 ISO8859-5 Little used cyrillic charset (Latin/Cyrillic).
ISO-8859-15 ISO8859-15 Western European, Latin-9. Adds the Euro sign, French and Finnish letters missing in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
UTF-8   ASCII compatible multi-byte 8-bit Unicode.
cp866 ibm866, 866 DOS-specific Cyrillic charset.
cp1251 Windows-1251, win-1251, 1251 Windows-specific Cyrillic charset.
cp1252 Windows-1252, 1252 Windows specific charset for Western European.
KOI8-R koi8-ru, koi8r Russian.
BIG5 950 Traditional Chinese, mainly used in Taiwan.
GB2312 936 Simplified Chinese, national standard character set.
BIG5-HKSCS   Big5 with Hong Kong extensions, Traditional Chinese.
Shift_JIS SJIS, SJIS-win, cp932, 932 Japanese
EUC-JP EUCJP, eucJP-win Japanese
MacRoman   Charset that was used by Mac OS.
''   An empty string activates detection from script encoding (Zend multibyte), default_charset and current locale (see nl_langinfo() and setlocale()), in this order. Not recommended.

Note: Any other character sets are not recognized. The default encoding will be used instead and a warning will be emitted.

Return Values

Returns the translation table as an array, with the original characters as keys and entities as values.

Changelog

Version Description
8.1.0 flags changed from ENT_COMPAT to ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

Examples

Example #1 Translation Table Example

<?php
var_dump
(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5));
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

array(1510) {
  ["
"]=>
  string(9) "&NewLine;"
  ["!"]=>
  string(6) "&excl;"
  ["""]=>
  string(6) "&quot;"
  ["#"]=>
  string(5) "&num;"
  ["$"]=>
  string(8) "&dollar;"
  ["%"]=>
  string(8) "&percnt;"
  ["&"]=>
  string(5) "&amp;"
  ["'"]=>
  string(6) "&apos;"
  // ...
}

See Also

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User Contributed Notes 13 notes

up
12
michael dot genesis at gmail dot com
12 years ago
The fact that MS-word and some other sources use CP-1252, and that it is so close to Latin1 ('ISO-8859-1') causes a lot of confusion. What confused me the most was finding that mySQL uses CP-1252 by default.

You may run into trouble if you find yourself tempted to do something like this:
<?php
    $trans
[chr(149)] = '&bull;';    // Bullet
   
$trans[chr(150)] = '&ndash;';    // En Dash
   
$trans[chr(151)] = '&mdash;';    // Em Dash
   
$trans[chr(152)] = '&tilde;';    // Small Tilde
   
$trans[chr(153)] = '&trade;';    // Trade Mark Sign
?>

Don't do it. DON'T DO IT!

You can use:
<?php
    $translationTable
= get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'WINDOWS-1252');
?>

or just convert directly:
<?php
    $output
= htmlentities($input, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'WINDOWS-1252');
?>

But your web page is probably encoded UTF-8, and you probably don't really want CP-1252 text flying around, so fix the character encoding first:
<?php
    $output
= mb_convert_encoding($input, 'UTF-8', 'WINDOWS-1252');
   
$ouput = htmlentities($output);
?>
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11
kevin at cwsmailbox dot xom
13 years ago
Be careful using get_html_translation_table() in a loop, as it's very slow.
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1
Patrick nospam at nospam mesopia dot com
18 years ago
Not sure what's going on here but I've run into a problem that others might face as well...

<?php

$translations
= array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES,ENT_QUOTES));

?>

returns the single quote ' as being equal to &#39; while

<?php

$translatedString
= htmlentities($string,ENT_QUOTES);

?>
returns it as being equal to &#039;

I've had to do a specific string replacement for the time being... Not sure if it's an issue with the function or the array manipulation.

-Pat
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1
Kenneth Kin Lum
15 years ago
to display the mapping on a webpage no matter what the server encoding is, this can be used

  echo "<pre>\n";
  echo htmlentities(print_r((get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS)), true));
  echo htmlentities(print_r((get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES)), true));

since get_html_translation_table() actually gives the special chars in iso-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding, so to see the tables correctly using

  print_r(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES));

your server needs to give a HTTP header as iso-8859-1, unless you use header() or manually set the browser's encoding setting to iso-8859-1.  And you need to view the source of the page to see the mapping.  (except English version of IE 7 outputs the page source as iso-8859-1 anyway).
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0
iain (duh) workingsoftware.com.au
16 years ago
I wrote a quick little function for converting something like '&middot;' into '&#183;':

$to_convert = '&middot;';
$table = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
$equiv = '&#'.ord(array_search($to_convert,$table)).';';
up
0
dirk at hartmann dot net
22 years ago
get_html_translation_table
It works only with the first 256 Codepositions.
For Higher Positions, for Example &#1092;
(a kyrillic Letter) it shows the same.
up
-2
kumar at chicagomodular.com
21 years ago
without heavy scientific analysis, this seems to work as a quick fix to making text originating from a Microsoft Word document display as HTML:

<?php
function DoHTMLEntities ($string)
    {
       
$trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);
       
       
// MS Word strangeness..
        // smart single/ double quotes:
       
$trans_tbl[chr(145)] = '\'';
       
$trans_tbl[chr(146)] = '\'';
       
$trans_tbl[chr(147)] = '&quot;';
       
$trans_tbl[chr(148)] = '&quot;';

               
// Acute 'e'
       
$trans_tbl[chr(142)] = '&eacute;';
       
        return
strtr ($string, $trans_tbl);
    }
?>
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-2
Jérôme Jaglale
17 years ago
htmlentities includes htmlspecialchars, so here's how to convert an UTF-8 string :
htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
up
-3
Maurizio Siliani at trident dot it
16 years ago
If you have troubles (like me) getting data from ISO-8859-1 encoded forms where user copy and paste from word, this routine could be useful.
It adds to the standard get_html_translation_table the codes of the characters usually M$ Word replacs into typed text.
Otherwise those characters would never be displayed correctly in html output.

function get_html_translation_table_CP1252() {
    $trans = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
    $trans[chr(130)] = '&sbquo;';    // Single Low-9 Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(131)] = '&fnof;';    // Latin Small Letter F With Hook
    $trans[chr(132)] = '&bdquo;';    // Double Low-9 Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(133)] = '&hellip;';    // Horizontal Ellipsis
    $trans[chr(134)] = '&dagger;';    // Dagger
    $trans[chr(135)] = '&Dagger;';    // Double Dagger
    $trans[chr(136)] = '&circ;';    // Modifier Letter Circumflex Accent
    $trans[chr(137)] = '&permil;';    // Per Mille Sign
    $trans[chr(138)] = '&Scaron;';    // Latin Capital Letter S With Caron
    $trans[chr(139)] = '&lsaquo;';    // Single Left-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(140)] = '&OElig;    ';    // Latin Capital Ligature OE
    $trans[chr(145)] = '&lsquo;';    // Left Single Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(146)] = '&rsquo;';    // Right Single Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(147)] = '&ldquo;';    // Left Double Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(148)] = '&rdquo;';    // Right Double Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(149)] = '&bull;';    // Bullet
    $trans[chr(150)] = '&ndash;';    // En Dash
    $trans[chr(151)] = '&mdash;';    // Em Dash
    $trans[chr(152)] = '&tilde;';    // Small Tilde
    $trans[chr(153)] = '&trade;';    // Trade Mark Sign
    $trans[chr(154)] = '&scaron;';    // Latin Small Letter S With Caron
    $trans[chr(155)] = '&rsaquo;';    // Single Right-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark
    $trans[chr(156)] = '&oelig;';    // Latin Small Ligature OE
    $trans[chr(159)] = '&Yuml;';    // Latin Capital Letter Y With Diaeresis
    ksort($trans);
    return $trans;
}
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-4
Alex Minkoff
18 years ago
If you want to display special HTML entities in a web browser, you can use the following code:

<?
$entities = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
foreach ($entities as $entity) {
    $new_entities[$entity] = htmlspecialchars($entity);
}
echo "<pre>";
print_r($new_entities);
echo "</pre>";
?>

If you don't, the key name of each element will appear to be the same as the element content itself, making it look mighty stupid. ;)
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-5
robertn972 at gmail dot com
15 years ago
I found this useful in converting latin characters

<?php
function convertLatin1ToHtml($str) {
$allEntities = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_NOQUOTES);
$specialEntities = get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS, ENT_NOQUOTES);
$noTags = array_diff($allEntities, $specialEntities);
$str = strtr($str, $noTags);
return
$str;
}
?>
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-6
alan at akbkhome dot com
21 years ago
If you want to decode all those &#123; symbols as well....

function unhtmlentities ($string)  {
    $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);
    $trans_tbl = array_flip ($trans_tbl);
    $ret = strtr ($string, $trans_tbl);
    return  preg_replace('/\&\#([0-9]+)\;/me',
        "chr('\\1')",$ret);
}
up
-4
kevin_bro at hostedstuff dot com
21 years ago
Alans version didn't seem to work right. If you're having the same problem consider using this slightly modified version instead:

function unhtmlentities ($string)  {
   $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table (HTML_ENTITIES);
   $trans_tbl = array_flip ($trans_tbl);
   $ret = strtr ($string, $trans_tbl);
   return preg_replace('/&#(\d+);/me',
      "chr('\\1')",$ret);
}
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