html entities and ampersands

[micha]

my php script gets delivered text that contains special chars (like
german umlauts), and these chars may, may partially or may not be
coverted into html entities already. i don't know beforhand.

question: how to spot wether an ampersand is just an ampersand and
needs to be converted or is part of an html entity and must be left
alone?

any help appreciated, micha

[Markus Ernst]

micha wrote:

my php script gets delivered text that contains special chars (like
german umlauts), and these chars may, may partially or may not be
coverted into html entities already. i don't know beforhand.

question: how to spot wether an ampersand is just an ampersand and
needs to be converted or is part of an html entity and must be left
alone?

any help appreciated, micha

http://ch2.php.net/html_entity_decode

Have PHP decode the entities, the remaining ampersands should be just
ampersands.

--
Markus

[micha]

Markus Ernst wrote:

micha wrote:

my php script gets delivered text that contains special chars (like
german umlauts), and these chars may, may partially or may not be
coverted into html entities already. i don't know beforhand.

question: how to spot wether an ampersand is just an ampersand and
needs to be converted or is part of an html entity and must be left
alone?

any help appreciated, micha
http://ch2.php.net/html_entity_decode

Have PHP decode the entities, the remaining ampersands should be just

ampersands.

--
Markus

yes, brilliant idea.
decode any present entities, than encode the whole thing again to get
any entity encoded (which is the aim, probably didn't become clear in
my 1st post).

micha