It is present in PHP4 and PHP5. In the simplest form, it takes as parameter the string to be converted:

$str='<a href="http://www.reconn.us">Reconn.us</a>'
$escaped_html=htmlentities($str);

The result will be like this:

&lt;a href="http://www.reconn.us"&gt;Reconn.us&lt;/a&gt;

The text is converted so every element that has a corespondent in HTML will be converted to that. For example,  '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'.

 If you also want to convert quotes, you may want to make use of the second parameter of this function, quote_style :

$str='<a href="http://www.reconn.us">Reconn.us</a>'
$escaped_html=htmlentities($str,ENT_QUOTES);

 This will result in this string:

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reconn.us&quot;&gt;Reconn.us&lt;/a&gt;

 The options for quote_style parameter are:

     - ENT_COMPAT - Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.

     -ENT_QUOTES - Will convert both double and single quotes.

     - ENT_NOQUOTES - Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted. (This is the default)

 The third parameter for this function is charset and the default is ISO-8859-1.

 To see how this function works, try our Online Escape HTML Tool !

Is very much like htmlentities() function. Unlike this function, it does not convert all applicable characters to HTML entities, but only some of them:

    - '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'

    - '"' (double quote) becomes '"' when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.

    - ''' (single quote) becomes '&#039;' only when ENT_QUOTES is set.

    - '<' (less than) becomes '<'

    - '>' (greater than) becomes '>'

 Otherwise, functions parameters are the same: string htmlspecialchars ( string $string [, int $quote_style [, string $charset]] );

To see the difference between these two functions I will show you an example:

 The simple text:

<b>Confirmar contraseña</b>

for htmlentities() function will output:

 &lt;b&gt;Confirmar contrase&ntilde;a&lt;/b&gt;

and for htmlspecialchars() function will output:

 &lt;b&gt;Confirmar contraseña&lt;/b&gt;

See the difference? For the first function, the special Spanish character ñ is translated also, while for the second is left unchanged.

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