encoding problems with htmlespecialchars and htmlentities

Question

Im having some trouble retrieving some info from my mysql database.

it stores that:

Comida Adultos:5<br />Comida Niños:5

and when I make that in the browser:

html_entity_decode($bookings['booking_observation'])

all is right but when I try to set to a cell with PHPExcel I get that string:

Comida Adultos:10<br />Comida Ni&ntilde;os:10

Answer 1

Ensure that you use UTF-8 for all the strings that you set in PHPExcel

html_entity_decode($bookings['booking_observation'], ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')

Note that <br /> has no special meaning in MS Excel, it's simply a series of characters, so you'll probably also want to do

str_replace('<br />', "\n", $value)