Define Default Charset for htmlentities()

Question

I was wondering if there were any way to define the default encoding for htmlentities(). I have a big project going that uses htmlentities calls all over the place, and was wondering if there was a simple way to set it from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 as the default character encoding, using something simple like init_set. Or possibly with a separate namespace declaration.

Failing that, I would not be opposed to renaming and overriding the htmlentities function to always use Unicode, but am reluctant to install anything as freaky (to me) as PECL apd.

Answer 1

As the manual page doesn't say anything about changing the default charset, I don't think there is a way to do that ; and I don't remember having ever seen anything about that.

I wouldn't use anything like apd either -- instead, I would probably :

• create my own function, that calls htmlentities with the right parameters
• and replace every call to htmlentities by a call to my new function (this can probably be done automatically, using a few lines of scripts)

Answer 2

@Pascal MARTIN's solution is definitely correct, you can also use utf8-encode to convert ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

And utf8_decode to convert UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1.