character encoding - PHP htmlentities() not working as expected

Question

I'm having a problem with htmlentities()

$txt = "árbol";
echo $txt; // outputs: árbol
echo htmlentities($txt); // outputs: ??rbol (árbol)

The second echo should output árbol (á)

I'm using utf-8:

<meta charset="utf-8">

What's going on? Thank you!

Answer 1

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