Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the PHP devs did not provide ANY way to set the default encoding used by htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities(), even though they changed the default encoding in PHP 5.4 (*golf clap for PHP devs*). To save someone the time of trying it, this does not work:
<?php
ini_set('default_charset', $charset); ?>
Unfortunately, the only way to not have to explicitly provide the second and third parameter every single time this function is called (which gets extremely tedious) is to write your own function as a wrapper:
<?php
define('CHARSET', 'ISO-8859-1');
define('REPLACE_FLAGS', ENT_COMPAT | ENT_XHTML);
function html($string) {
return htmlspecialchars($string, REPLACE_FLAGS, CHARSET);
}
echo html("ñ"); ?>
You can do the same for htmlentities()
