HTMl Entities Not Decoding

[condoug]

Hi all

I save my content using htmlentities() and pull the content out on the front end however I am experiencing issues with certain characters not displaying on the webpage and instead, a black diamond is appearing.

This is what I have stored in my database:

<span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;">Rücktrittsversicherung<br />

Everything displays fine with the exception of the umlaut - this is happening throughout the page.

Any idea why the ü is not displaying as it should?

I pull out my content as follows:

echo html_entity_decode($content);

Thanks in advance.
Doug

[bradgrafelman]

Why the constant encoding/decoding? Why not just store the data in the DB as-is and only convert it when you retrieve it from the DB and use it for a specific purpose?

Otherwise, make sure the encoding of your webpage matches the encoding supplied to [man]html_entity_decode/man.

[condoug]

Hi bradgrafelman

Could you elaborate a bit more please as I don't understand how you would decode something that hasn't been encoded?

For example, if I did not encode my example, the databaase would contain this string:

<span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;">Rücktrittsversicherung</span>

But when I do this, the ü still comes out as strange characters.

Thanks in advance

[bradgrafelman]

condoug;10998634 wrote:

Could you elaborate a bit more please as I don't understand how you would decode something that hasn't been encoded?

You wouldn't. That's the whole point of not encoding it in the first place; there's no need to decode something that hasn't been encoded.

condoug;10998634 wrote:

But when I do this, the ü still comes out as strange characters.

That sounds like a character encoding problem. Make sure the charset/encoding is consistent (database/table/column, SQL connection, <meta> and/or HTTP header - all of these specify character encodings, so all of these need to match).