htmlspecialchars in php not decoding

Question

I have a application where I store sting as it is but while dispying, I want special characters to be converted to their HTML name like for < will be &lt . To achieve it, I am using php inbuilt function htmlspecialchars.

Output of text with this function is achieved with following code

$reviewTxt = htmlspecialchars($reviewTxt);
echo $reviewTxt; 

Now, for reviewTxt to be 'I loved you <3', it should produce I loved you <3 but should display the original text. In my case, it displays the encoded data I loved you <3 . I also tried to paste I loved you <3 instead of above php code just to see if I can get original text and yes, it shows 'I loved you <3'.

I am not sure what I am missing,

Answer 1

It looks like you are encoding twice with htmlspecialchars() / htmlentities() .

That causes the & symbol of the first result to be encoded in the second result, giving you a string like I loved you <3 .

So it will show the encoded & followed by the litteral string lt; .