Encoding issue, coverting & to & for html using php

Question

I have a url in html:

I need to turn it into a string exactly as:

Answer 1

There is no built in PHP function that will take an entity such as & and turn it into a double &. Just in case there is any confusion, the html entity for & is actually &, not amp;, so running any built in parser on your example will return the following:

and not

In order to get the double & version, you will need to use a regular expression.

Alternatively, if you in fact want the single & version, you have two possibilities.

1. If you just wish to convert & " ' < > then you should use htmlspecialchars_decode. This would be sufficient for the example you give.
2. If you wish to convert any string of the format &TEXT; then you should use html-entity-decode.

I suspect that htmlspecialchars_decode will be faster than html_entity_decode so if it covers all the entities you wish to convert, you should use that.