Bug #62861 [Nab]: htmlentities returns empty string when it shouldn't

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62861&edit=1 ID: 62861 User updated by: soapergem at gmail dot com Reported by: soapergem at gmail dot com Summary: htmlentities returns empty string when it shouldn't Status: Not a bug Type: Bug Package: *General Issues Operating System: Windows PHP Version: 5.4.6 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: With respect, the 72% figure you cited is misleading at best. The character encoding listed in the HTML gives no indication of what encoding the files were actually saved in. All it is is a <meta> tag in that <head> that says UTF-8. I would suspect the vast majority of those files are still saved in ISO-8859-1, though. My prediction is that you're going to get A LOT of complaints over the switch -- especially from Windows users, who almost always save things in ISO-8859-1, since that is the default encoding in Windows. With PHP on Windows ever growing, fighting the Windows users is just shooting yourself in the foot. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 04:38:50] rasmus@php.net UTF-8 is only compatible with low-ascii, not with high. The copyright symbol in ISO-8859-1 is character code (in hex) <A9>. In UTF-8 the copyright symbol is represented by two bytes, <C2><A9>. The world has gone UTF-8. If your editor is in UTF-8 mode and you enter/paste a copyright symbol and pass it to htmlentities() you will get "&copy;" back. So rather than change the code to hardcode ISO-8859-1 you should convert your datasources to UTF-8. Most of them are probably already UTF-8 which means that your current code was likely not handling these correctly since it assumed ISO-8859-1 before. For some perspetive: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/character_encoding/all which shows that 72% of the top-million sites on the Web are using UTF-8. And this number is growing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 04:14:03] soapergem at gmail dot com Description: ------------ Doesn't UTF-8 include basic ASCII characters, too? Right now when I try to encode the copyright symbol (©) using htmlentities (it should encode to &copy;), it doesn't work. I discovered this since the default encoding for htmlentities() was switched from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 in version 5.4. I have plenty of places where I rely on basic symbols, such as the copyright symbol, being encoded properly with htmlentities(). Having to go in and change all the instances of htmlentities($string) to htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'ISO-8859-1') is not practical (there are MANY). And with the whole output of the function being blank, it just makes my scripts completely unusable now. Help! Test script: --------------- <?php echo htmlentities('©', ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'UTF-8'); ?> Expected result: ---------------- &copy; Actual result: -------------- (Nothing - an empty string) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62861&edit=1