PHP htmlentities() not working as expected

Question

I'm having a problem with htmlentities()

$txt = "árbol";
echo $txt; // outputs: árbol
echo htmlentities($txt); // outputs: Ã¡rbol (&Atilde;&iexcl;rbol)

The second echo should output árbol (á)

I'm using utf-8:

<meta charset="utf-8">

What's going on? Thank you!

It's worth noting that this shouldn't normally be necessary to do. If you're having trouble with broken characters, adjust your encodings instead. Somewhat related: [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/q/279170) — Pekka, Feb 11 '13 at 23:23

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 08 '11 at 17:19

You have to set the third parameter of htmlentities() which tells the charset to use. Because of you don't set it, the default is used and the default is ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8.

Like htmlspecialchars(), it takes an optional third argument charset which defines character set used in conversion. Presently, the ISO-8859-1 character set is used as the default.

Just to clarify, this is the function signature:

string htmlentities ( string $string [, int $flags = ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401 [, string $charset [, bool $double_encode = true ]]] )

and here you'll find the official doc: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

PHP htmlentities() not working as expected

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