note 94572 deleted from function.htmlentities by danbrown

Note Submitter: insid0r at yahoo dot com ---- @ montana (Jul-2009): I think you're operating under a misunderstanding. It looks like you've saved your PHP source code (or are in some other way giving your input) in UTF-8 encoding, without telling htmlentities() that the input is in UTF-8. By default, htmlentities() assumes input is encoded in ISO-8859-1 (single byte, fixed-width character encoding). If you pass it "ñ" (ISO character 241), it returns &ntilde; just fine. If you pass it "ñ" (this is technically the 2-byte UTF-8 sequence representing ñ) and do not specify UTF-8 as the encoding to htmlentities(), it will return &Atilde;&plusmn;, because those are the corresponding entities for those ISO characters. Try specifying "UTF-8" as the input encoding, and it should work. If you are applying htmlentities() to form input, many browsers will default to posting in UTF-8, even if the character encoding of the site is ISO-8859-1. Other browsers will try to use the encoding of the page. Specify ACCEPT-CHARSET as UTF-8 in your FORM, and use utf8_encode() before processing to make sure everything works uniformly (input sanitation is _always_ a good idea.) Example proof of concept: <?php $ntilde = chr(241); //This = ñ in ISO-8859-1 $ntildeUTF = utf8_encode($ntilde); //This = ñ in ISO-8859-1, or ñ in UTF-8 echo htmlentities($ntilde); //returns "&ntilde;" echo htmlentities($ntilde, null, "UTF-8"); //returns "" (input is not a valid UTF-8 sequence) echo htmlentities($ntildeUTF); //returns "&Atilde;&plusmn;" because that's what the UTF-8 looks like in one-byte ASCII echo htmlentities($ntildeUTF, null, "UTF-8"); //returns "&ntilde;" as it should ?>