What is the difference between using htmlentities() and utf8_decode() when dealing with special characters in PHP?

When dealing with special characters in PHP, htmlentities() is used to convert special characters to HTML entities, while utf8_decode() is used to convert UTF-8 encoded characters to ISO-8859-1. If you are dealing with special characters that need to be displayed as HTML entities, use htmlentities(). If you are dealing with UTF-8 encoded characters that need to be converted to ISO-8859-1, use utf8_decode(). 

// Using htmlentities() to convert special characters to HTML entities
$specialString = "Special characters: & < >";
$convertedString = htmlentities($specialString);
echo $convertedString;

// Using utf8_decode() to convert UTF-8 encoded characters to ISO-8859-1
$utf8String = "UTF-8 encoded characters: é";
$convertedString = utf8_decode($utf8String);
echo $convertedString;

Keywords

htmlentities utf8_decode special characters PHP encoding

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