Nikita Popov's Blog: htmlspecialchars() improvements in PHP 5.4

In this new post to his blog Nikita Popov looks at an update that might have gotten lost in the shuffle of new features coming in PHP 5.4 - some updates to htmlspecialchars.

One set of changes that I think is particularly important was largely overlooked: For PHP 5.4 cataphract (Artefacto on StackOverflow) heroically rewrote large parts of htmlspecialchars thus fixing various quirks and adding some really nice new features. Here a quick summary of the most important changes: UTF-8 as the default charset, improved error handling (ENT_SUBSTITUTE) and Doctype handling (ENT_HTML401,...).

He goes into each of these three main features in a bit more detail, providing code to illustrate the improved error handling and the new flags for Doctype handling (covering HTML 4.01, HTML 5, XML 1 and XHTML).