What is the function htmlentities() used for in PHP?

The htmlentities() function in PHP is used to convert special characters to HTML entities. This is important for security purposes, as it helps prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by escaping characters that could be interpreted as HTML code. By using htmlentities(), you can ensure that user input is displayed as plain text on the webpage, rather than being executed as code. 

$input = "<script>alert('XSS attack!');</script>";
$encoded_input = htmlentities($input);
echo $encoded_input;

Keywords

PHP htmlentities() encoding security output

Related Questions