Decoding html entities issue

Question

I have the following line of text that I need to display

<ul><li>Complementary to cleansing with HY-ÖL®<li>Especially for irritated and sensitive skin<li>Noticeably calms and relaxes the skin</ul>

if I do the following

html_entity_decode('<ul><li>Complementary to cleansing with HY-ÖL®<li>Especially for irritated and sensitive skin<li>Noticeably calms and relaxes the skin</ul>');

the text comes ou the following way

* Complementary to cleansing with HY-�L�
* Especially for irritated and sensitive skin
* Noticeably calms and relaxes the skin

the problem is that it tries to encode the HY-ÖL® aswell and then it ends up like this HY-�L�

Confused here, please help

Answer 1

Check your header-encoding to see that you're sending the right encoding.

Example for utf-8 encoding.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Answer 2

Try setting the page's encoding type to utf-8 eg:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Answer 3

You need to specify the character encoding you want the output in:

html_entity_decode('…', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')

Otherwise html_entity_decode assumes ISO 8859-1 as default.