htmlentities in PHP but preserving html tags

You can get the list of correspondances character => entity used by htmlentities, with the function get_html_translation_table ; consider this code :

$list = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);var_dump($list);

(You might want to check the second parameter to that function in the manual -- maybe you'll need to set it to a value different than the default one)

It will get you something like this :

array  ' ' => string ' ' (length=6)  '¡' => string '¡' (length=7)  '¢' => string '¢' (length=6)  '£' => string '£' (length=7)  '¤' => string '¤' (length=8)  ....  ....  ....  'ÿ' => string 'ÿ' (length=6)  '"' => string '"' (length=6)  '<' => string '<' (length=4)  '>' => string '>' (length=4)  '&' => string '&' (length=5)

Now, remove the correspondances you don't want :

unset($list['"']);unset($list['<']);unset($list['>']);unset($list['&']);

Your list, now, has all the correspondances character => entity used by htmlentites, except the few characters you don't want to encode.

And now, you just have to extract the list of keys and values :

$search = array_keys($list);$values = array_values($list);

And, finally, you can use str_replace to do the replacement :

$str_in = '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>';$str_out = str_replace($search, $values, $str_in);var_dump($str_out);

And you get :

string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>' (length=84)

Which looks like what you wanted ;-)

Edit : well, except for the encoding problem (damn UTF-8, I suppose -- I'm trying to find a solution for that, and will edit again)

Second edit couple of minutes after : it seem you'll have to use utf8_encode on the $search list, before calling str_replace :-(

Which means using something like this :

$search = array_map('utf8_encode', $search);

Between the call to array_keys and the call to str_replace.

And, this time, you should really get what you wanted :

string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>' (length=70)

And here is the full portion of code :

$list = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);unset($list['"']);unset($list['<']);unset($list['>']);unset($list['&']);$search = array_keys($list);$values = array_values($list);$search = array_map('utf8_encode', $search);$str_in = '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>';$str_out = str_replace($search, $values, $str_in);var_dump($str_in, $str_out);

And the full output :

string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>' (length=58)string '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>' (length=70)

This time, it should be ok ^^
It doesn't really fit in one line, is might not be the most optimized solution ; but it should work fine, and has the advantage of allowing you to add/remove any correspondance character => entity you need or not.

Have fun !

Might not be terribly efficient, but it works

$sample = '<p><font style="color:#FF0000">Camión español</font></p>';echo htmlspecialchars_decode(    htmlentities($sample, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8', false)  , ENT_NOQUOTES);

This is optimized version of the accepted answer.

$list = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);unset($list['"']);unset($list['<']);unset($list['>']);unset($list['&']);$string = strtr($string, $list);