Fix description with special characters

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Hi,

I am trying to set the description of my page from a retrieved description from a PHP call using this code:

PHP

<description><?php echo $description; ?></description>

but sometimes the description has special characters, for example:

this is a description of "technology!" website

this is cause a problem when I open the website because it will just echo the description on the page itself

How can I fix this please?

Thanks,
Jassim

What I have tried:

PHP

<description><?php echo $description; ?></description>

Posted 17-Feb-20 10:41am

Jassim Rahma

Updated 17-Feb-20 23:59pm

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MadMyche · Answer 1 · 2020-02-17T11:36:00

Solution 1

PHP has a function just for this

PHP Manual
htmlentities: This function is identical to htmlspecialchars() in all ways, except with htmlentities(), all characters which have HTML character entity equivalents are translated into these entities.

Reference:
PHP: htmlentities - Manual[^]

Posted 17-Feb-20 11:36am

MadMyche

Comments

Jassim Rahma 18-Feb-20 6:58am

But I am still having the problem even with using htmlentities.

Here is the test link and you can see two problems:

1. there is an output test shown on the top.
2. The format is not exactly as per the original page.

The Link:

https://www.softnames.com/tempopengraph/index2.php

The Original Page:

https://www.bbc.com/arabic/world-51522045

MadMyche 18-Feb-20 7:03am

The page you are creating is not valid HTML; You can see your HEAD section being written out and then you grab the copy from BBC which has another HEAD section. There is also no AUTHOR or DESCRIPTION elements in the HEAD element.

Jassim Rahma 18-Feb-20 11:53am

Then what's the best way if I want to use my own page (own head and meta tags) with just embedding other pages? my main purpose is to provide a header with a back button or my page logo

How can I do that without having to use frames?

MadMyche 18-Feb-20 12:37pm

The correct way would be to only take the "body" portion of the retrieved page.

And... seeing what you are doing; do you have permission from the BBC to re-use their content?

Jassim Rahma 18-Feb-20 13:02pm

But if I take the then all links within the head won't be included, e.g. CSS or scripts?