PHP5.3 htmlentities with ENT_HTML5 throws error message

Question

I recieve data from post form and want do store it in MySQL the code line for handling the input is:

$tekst = $_POST["tekst"];
$tekst = htmlentities($tekst, ENT_QUOTES, ENT_HTML5, "UTF-8");

When I run this I get the error message: Warning: htmlentities(): charset `ENT_HTML5' not supported, assuming iso-8859-1 in savepage.php on line 14 index.php?id=1&ret=1 1

How do I overcome the warning?

Answer 1

You got that error because you used the flag ENT_HTML5 which appeared only in PHP5.4.0 .

As you can confirm this from the official documentation :

5.4.0 The constants ENT_SUBSTITUTE, ENT_DISALLOWED, ENT_HTML401, ENT_XML1, ENT_XHTML and ENT_HTML5 were added.

If your only goal is to overcome that error, then you can simply let the flags of the htmlentities() function not set. Let PHP to treat them by default.

I mean, change this:

$tekst = htmlentities($tekst, ENT_QUOTES, ENT_HTML5, "UTF-8");

To:

$tekst = htmlentities($tekst, "UTF-8");

An other option, is to set replace them with other flags supported by PHP5.3.0 , such as:

• ENT_COMPAT : Default. Encodes only double quotes

• ENT_IGNORE : Ignores invalid encoding instead of having the function return an empty string. Should be avoided, as it may have security implications.