Htmlspecialchars FAQ

Usage from Address Bar

You can use direct access to this page from your browser address bar. Type string that you need to encode/decode with algorithm according to next schema: https://md5calc.com/html/<TYPE:enc|dec>/<PHRASE> For example to visit page that contains encoded "<strong>" you can just visit url: https://md5calc.com/html/enc/<strong> The another cool thing is that you can specify "json" or "plain" mode into URL and you will get only encoded/decoded in response.
Schema of this future: https://md5calc.com/html/<TYPE:enc|dec>.<OUTPUT:plain|json>/<PHRASE> Example: https://md5calc.com/html/enc.plain/<strong> Will output: <strong>

Usage from Javascript

We have removed CORS restriction so you can use direct access to htmlspecialchars encode/decode in your javascript applications via AJAX.

Example:

var toEncode = '<strong>';
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
  if (xhr.readyState == 4 && xhr.status == 200) {
    console.log('String "'+toEncode+'"'
                +' encoded with htmlspecialchars is'
                +' "'+JSON.parse(xhr.response)+'"'
    );
  };
};
xhr.open('GET', 'https://md5calc.com/html/enc.json/'+encodeURIComponent(toEncode), true);
xhr.send();

Usage from PHP

You can use direct access to this function in your applications.

PHP Example:

<?php
    $str = '<strong>';
    $url ='http://md5calc.sv/html/enc.plain/'.urlencode($str);
    $htmlencoded = file_get_contents($url);
    echo 'String "'.htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_IGNORE)
         .'" encoded with htmlspecialchars is "'
         .htmlspecialchars($htmlencoded, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_IGNORE).'"'
    ;

Keep in mind that this example no make sense because PHP has builtin functions htmlspecialchars() and htmlspecialchars_decode() which do the same.

How to make the same in PHP

<?php
    $str = '<script>';
    $htmlSpecialCharsEncodedStr = htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_IGNORE);
    $htmlSpecialCharsDecodedStr = htmlspecialchars_decode($htmlSpecialCharsEncodedStr, ENT_QUOTES);
    echo '<pre>';
    echo htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_IGNORE).PHP_EOL
         .' &rarr; '.htmlspecialchars($htmlSpecialCharsEncodedStr, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_IGNORE).PHP_EOL
         .' &rarr; '.htmlspecialchars($htmlSpecialCharsDecodedStr, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_IGNORE).PHP_EOL
       ;
    echo '</pre>';