PHP String get_html_translation_table() Function

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The PHP String get_html_translation_table() function is used to return the translation table used by the htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars() functions. Some characters can be encoded in a variety of ways. The get_html_translation_table() method returns the most often used encoding.

Syntax

Below is the syntax of the PHP String get_html_translation_table() function −

array get_html_translation_table ( int $table, int $flags, string $encoding )

Parameters

Below are the parameters of the get_html_translation_table() function −

• $table − It contains the information about which table to return Either HTML_ENTITIES or HTML_SPECIALCHARS.

• $flags − It is a bitmask of one or more of the specified flags that determine which quotes the table will contain and which document type the table is intended for. The default value is ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML401.

• $encoding − It is the encoding to be used. If omitted, this argument's default value is UTF-8.

Available Flags Constants

Here is the available flags constants −

• ENT_COMPAT: Table will contain entities for double-quotes but not for single-quotes.

• ENT_QUOTES: Table will contain entities for both double and single quotes.

• ENT_NOQUOTES: Table will neither contain entities for single quotes nor for double quotes.

• ENT_SUBSTITUTE: Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) instead of returning an empty string.

• ENT_HTML401: Table for HTML 4.01.

• ENT_XML1: Table for XML 1.

• ENT_XHTML: Table for XHTML.

• ENT_HTML5: Table for HTML 5.

Encoding Values

The allowed values are as follows −

• UTF-8: Standard encoding, compatible with ASCII, supports multiple languages and symbols.

• ISO-8859-1: Western European character set.

• ISO-8859-15: Western European character set (includes the Euro symbol and French and Finnish letters missing in ISO-8859-1).

• cp866: Character set used by DOS for Cyrillic languages.

• cp1251: Character set for Cyrillic languages, used by Windows.

• cp1252: Windows character set for Western European languages.

• KOI8-R: Cyrillic character set used in Russian.

• BIG5: Traditional Chinese character set, mainly used in Taiwan.

• GB2312: Simplified Chinese character set, national standard in China.

• BIG5-HKSCS: Big5 with additional symbols for Hong Kong.

• Shift_JIS: Character set for Japanese, commonly used in Japan.

• EUC-JP: Japanese character set used for extended character encoding.

Return Value

The translation table is returned as an array by the get_html_translation_table() function, where the keys represent the original characters and the values represent entities.

PHP Version

First introduced in core PHP 4, the get_html_translation_table() function continues to function easily in PHP 5, PHP 7, and PHP 8.

Example 1

First we will show you the basic example of the PHP String get_html_translation_table() function to output the HTML translation table.

<?php
// Use the get_html_translation_table() function here
print_r (get_html_translation_table());  
?>

Output

Here is the outcome of the following code −

Array
(
    ["] => "
    [&] => &
    ['] => '
    [ <
    [>] => >
)

Example 2

The below code generates an associative array that maps special characters such as <, >, and & to their associated HTML entity codes. The HTML_SPECIALCHARS constant tells the function to return a translation table for HTML characters that have specific meanings.

<?php
print_r (get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS));  
?> 

Output

This will generate the below output −

Array
(
    ["] => "
    [&] => &
    ['] => '
    [ <
    [>] => >
)

Example 3

In the PHP code below we try to return an associative array that maps all characters to their respective HTML entity codes, like special characters and extended symbols. The HTML_ENTITIES constant tells the function to return the whole set of character to entity mappings contained in HTML.

<?php
print_r (get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES));  
?> 

Output

This will create the below output −