PHP and the euro symbo

Question

Lets assume the following string is entered into a form and submitted to a PHP script.

"€ should encode as €"

I would like to know how to actually get € to encode as € htmlentities() doesn't do it, what voodoo is needed in order to get that to encode properly (and others like it)?

Answer 1

It works with htmlentities. But you need to make sure to use the proper character set as htmlentities’ default character set ISO 8859-1 does not contain that character; but ISO 8859-15 for example does:

var_dump(htmlentities("\xA4", ENT_COMPAT, 'ISO-8859-15') === '€');  // bool(true)

Here the "\xA4" will result in the byte 0xA4 that is the code of € in ISO 8859-15.

So just make sure to use a character set that contains that character.

Answer 2

echo "€ should encode as " . htmlentities("€", ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');