convert german umlaut with a bash one-liner using php

Question

Does anyone know why this just gives me an ? instead of a german ä ?

me$: php -r 'echo html_entity_decode("ä");'

The & for instance works well. The locale settings are:

LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

I am using bash on a Mac.

Answer 1

Try this:

php -r 'echo html_entity_decode("ä",ENT_COMPAT,"UTF-8");'

See: http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php