php, how to convert special characters to text?

5 Views

xxxi have the_title() that returns some text, in this case Blue & Whiny

the problem as we can see is that the & character looks different

Read More

how do i turn Blue & Whiny into Blue & Whiny i tryed: htmlspecialchars_decode(the_title()), html_entity_decode(the_title()),htmlspecialchars(the_title()) and nothing.

i want to convert & to &

there is not much code to share, I just do this: <?php the_title() ?> and i get Blue & Whiny. If i use get_the_title() it wont display anything

Any ideas?
Thanks

edit1. ill share some code: 

<script type="text/javascript">
function showShareUI() {

var act = new gigya.services.socialize.UserAction();
act.setUserMessage("Check out this article.");
act.setTitle("Trends on Explore Talent - <?php  the_title(); ?>");
act.setDescription("<?php  get_the_content();  ?>");
act.setLinkBack("<?php  the_permalink();  ?>");
act.addActionLink("Check out this article", "<?php the_permalink(); ?>");

var image = {
src: 'http://xxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/BOTTOM_BANNER.jpg',
href: '<?php the_permalink();?>',
type: 'image'
}
act.addMediaItem(image);

var params = 
{
userAction: act,  // The UserAction object enfolding the newsfeed data.                                           
onError: onError,  // onError method will be summoned if an error occurs. 
onSendDone: onSendDone // onError method will be summoned after 
,showEmailButton: true
    // Gigya finishes the publishing process.
};

gigya.services.socialize.showShareUI(conf, params);
}

function onError(event) {
alert('An error has occured' + ': ' + event.errorCode + '; ' + event.errorMessage);
}

function onSendDone(event)
{
document.getElementById('status').style.color = "green";
document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = 'The newsfeed has been posted to: ' +     event.providers;
}
</script>

I’ve tried everything. This starts to annoy me…

Post Views: 5

Related posts

Leave a Reply

5 comments

  1. html_entity_decode() is the correct way to do it.

    html_entity_decode("Blue & Whiny");

    Will produce:

    Blue & Whiny

    If it’s not working, make sure you don’t have another issue – such as passing a string to it that is double encoded, or running htmlentities() on the string again later.

    Demo: http://codepad.org/BHXGWXJi

    Double check with a literal string and var_dump() the output, you should see the decoded version. Then var_dump(the_title()), to make sure you are actually passing what you think you are to html_entity_decode().

  3. the_title() directly prints the title, so adding html_entity_decode() directly around that won’t work. You can, however, stop it from printing with its third function argument. E.g.

    <?php echo html_entity_decode(the_title('', '', false)) ?>

    There’s also get_the_title(), which doesn’t directly print the title, but it requires the ID of the post you want the title of, in contrast with the_title, which prints the title of the current post in The Loop. So you need to do something like this:

    <?php echo html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID)) ?>

    And actually, you should be able to simply do:

    <?php echo $post->post_title ?>

    The only reason these utility functions are there is to escape things for you and add tags and stuff. If you just want the raw input, you can print it directly.

    This won’t fix all of your issues, though, because you’re echoing it inside a JavaScript string, so you need to escape certain characters. json_encode() should do the trick, but see the question “Pass a PHP string to a Javascript variable (including escaping newlines)” for more details.