htmlentities() htmlspecialchars() question. (btw, I read the manual)

[frijole]

I read about these functions in the manual but I do not understand in what situation this would be necessary? It seems like it is encoded and then decoded whenever it is used. I am confused.

[NogDog]

The normal use is when outputting text to an [X]HTML document.

$text = "This text has some <special> characters & such that should not be treated as special HTML characters."
echo "<p>".htmlentities($text)."</p>\n";

Output would be something like:

<p>This text has some &lt;special&gt; characters &amp; such that should not be treated as special HTML characters.</p>

PS: If you don't understand why: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.3

[frijole]

ok, thanks. What I didn't know was that the browser could interpret the encoded characters.