Print less-than and greater-than symbols in PHP

Question

I am have troubles trying to print out < > symbols in HTML using PHP.

I am appending a string \"\" to a v

Answer 1

You need to turn them into e.g. < and > - see the htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() functions.

Answer 2

echo htmlentities($output);

or

echo htmlspecialchars($output);

If you don't want to bother manually going through your string and replacing the entities.

Answer 3

If you are outputting HTML, you cannot just use < and > : you must use the corresponding HTML entities : < and >

If you have a string in PHP and want to automatically replace those characters by the corresponding HTML entities, you'll be interested by the htmlspecialchars() function (quoting) :

The translations performed are:

• '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'
• '"' (double quote) becomes '"' when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.
• "'" (single quote) becomes ''' only when ENT_QUOTES is set.
• '<' (less than) becomes '<'
• '>' (greater than) becomes '>'

In your case, a portion of code like this one :

$output = " ";

echo htmlspecialchars($output, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

Would get you the following HTML code as output :

 <machine> 

And, just in case, if you want to encode more characters, you should take a look at the htmlentities() function.

Answer 4

> = >
< = <

Or you can use htmlspecialchars.

$output .= htmlspecialchars(" <machine> ");

Answer 5

Your trouble is not with PHP, but rather with the fact that < and > are used in HTML. If you want them to display in the browser, you probably want to print out their escaped entity versions:

• < is <
• > is >

You can also use the htmlspecialchars() function to automatically convert them:

echo htmlspecialchars("<machine>");

Answer 6

use "htmlspecialchars_decode()"

e.g.

<?php 
$a= htmlspecialchars('<?php ');
$a=$a.htmlspecialchars('echo shell_exec("ipconfig"); ');
$a=$a.htmlspecialchars('?>');

echo htmlspecialchars_decode($a);
?>