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

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62861&edit=1 ID: 62861 Comment by: nikic@php.net 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: The default_charset sets default charset for the Content-Type header. It doesn't really have anything to do with the htmlspecialchars() family of functions. The '' encoding is some sort of magic charset detection algorithm that may or may not guess correctly. The docs explicitly state that you should not use it. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 14:31:20] soapergem at gmail dot com I am aware that Notepad is not a suitable editor for development. It is just the de facto "basic" editor in Windows. If something doesn't work in Notepad, you're usually in trouble. I use an editor called EditPlus, which is a very good editor. The older version which I have used does not have support for removing the BOM, but I see the newer version does, so I will have to upgrade. But I would really appreciate it if you could address my suggestion about using the default_charset defined in php.ini automatically. Right now having to call htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, "") seems very counter-intuitive to invoke what should be the default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 14:27:31] rasmus@php.net Every real editor can do that. Windows Notepad is not a real editor. Notepad++ (which is free and much much better than Notepad), Notepad2, Textmate, Vim, Jedit, Ultraedit, Emacs, SourceEdit can all do this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 14:27:07] nikic@php.net Windows Notepad does not support this because Notepad is not a suitable editor for development. All development-oriented texteditors and IDEs support saving files without BOM. One commonly used text editor for Windows is Notepad++ (in case you don't want to use a full-blown IDE). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 14:11:43] soapergem at gmail dot com There is no option to save without the BOM in Windows Notepad. Nor is there an option to save with/without the BOM in many other Windows editors. It is automatically added to the file and there is nothing I can do about that -- short of writing a script to programmatically go through all my other scripts with fopen(), remove the first three characters, and then re-save. That is NOT a practical option. PHP should be handling this. As it stands, PHP 5.4 is completely unusable. Until you guys fix this, I need to stick with 5.3, because 5.4 will break all of my scripts -- and all the scripts of ANYONE who uses htmlentities() on a Windows server. Please take my suggestion about using the default_charset to heart. That would finally resolve this issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-08-19 13:59:09] nikic@php.net Save your document as UTF-8 *without* BOM. The  is just what the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) looks like when it is output (which is probably something you don't want, so save the file without it). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62861 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62861&edit=1