note 21151 modified in function.htmlspecialchars by john

I was trying to retrieve information from a database to display it into the browser. However it did not work as I was expecting. For instance double quotes (“”) and single quotes (‘’) were conflicting in HTML in an INPUT selector. The first approach to solve this was to use htmlspecialchars to convert special characters to HTML entities to display the input box with its value. $encode=htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES); However, the result was having HTML entities with a \ (backslash) preceding it (escape characters). For instance ampersand (&) becomes \&amp; displaying \& and double quotes becomes \&quot; displaying \” So the final solution was to replace first any \ (backslash) and then ask htmlspecialchars to make the conversion. [Editor's Note: This is the wrong way to do this. The proper way is to use stripslashes($str) $encoded=htmlspecialchars(str_replace('\\', '', $str), ENT_QUOTES); Try this example to see it your self. <form action="<?php echo $PHP_SELF; ?>"> <input type="text" name="str" size="20" value=""> <input type="submit" value="Submit"> <br> <?php if (!empty($str)) { $encoded=htmlspecialchars(str_replace('\\', '', $str), ENT_QUOTES); echo "<br><p>Result: <b>".$encoded."</b>. It should be the same you just typed</p>"; echo "<p>But source code is transformed to:<b><xmp>".$encoded."</xmp></b></p>"; // I know, I know <xmp> is deprecated in HTML 4 but was easy to use this time to display result. } ?> </form> Hope this will helps someone. --was-- I was trying to retrieve information from a database to display it into the browser. However it did not work as I was expecting. For instance double quotes (“”) and single quotes (‘’) were conflicting in HTML in an INPUT selector. The first approach to solve this was to use htmlspecialchars to convert special characters to HTML entities to display the input box with its value. $encode=htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES); However, the result was having HTML entities with a \ (backslash) preceding it (escape characters). For instance ampersand (&) becomes \&amp; displaying \& and double quotes becomes \&quot; displaying \” So the final solution was to replace first any \ (backslash) and then ask htmlspecialchars to make the conversion. $encoded=htmlspecialchars(str_replace('\\', '', $str), ENT_QUOTES); Try this example to see it your self. <form action="<?php echo $PHP_SELF; ?>"> <input type="text" name="str" size="20" value=""> <input type="submit" value="Submit"> <br> <?php if (!empty($str)) { $encoded=htmlspecialchars(str_replace('\\', '', $str), ENT_QUOTES); echo "<br><p>Result: <b>".$encoded."</b>. It should be the same you just typed</p>"; echo "<p>But source code is transformed to:<b><xmp>".$encoded."</xmp></b></p>"; // I know, I know <xmp> is deprecated in HTML 4 but was easy to use this time to display result. } ?> </form> Hope this will helps someone. http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php