Decoding HTML Special Character

Question

I want to export some of my data into CSV with the help of PHP. The code is working correctly but some of the keywords that I want to export was in some other unicode which I had saved in database using

urlencode('אריה דרעי');

This saved the unicode in this format in database:

%26%231488%3B%26%231512%3B%26%231497%3B%26%231492%3B+%26%231491%3B%26%231512%3B%26%231506%3B%26%231497%3B

The main problem here is when I display it in an HTML page it displays fine but when I try to export it in CSV it shows the same texts.

I tried to use following function

url_decode('%26%231488%3B%26%231512%3B%26%231497%3B%26%231492%3B+%26%231491%3B%26%231512%3B%26%231506%3B%26%231497%3B');

But it again genereated special characters as

אריה דרעי

Then I tried it to further decode using

 htmlspecialchars_decode();

But still it shows אריה דרעי in the CSV files.

I hope I make sense.

Answer 1

Try using htmlspecialchars() instead of url_encode()

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php and http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php