How to escape to htmlentities except for html tags in smarty

Question

Example:

$smarty->assign('string', '<p>Germans use "Ümlauts" and pay in €uro</p>');

{$string|escape|unescape:"html"}

results in:

<p>Germans use 'Ümlauts' and pay in €uro</p>

What am I doing wrong...

Answer 1

You should also add UTF-8 to escape function as in documentation: http://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/language.modifier.escape

Answer 2

There are more than one reasons why this can occur.

Check the encoding of

1. your php files,
2. your template files and
3. your html output (doctype and meta tags),

usually it is one of those which provokes this.

To avoid this kind of issue, in many cases the best way is to use utf8 throughout your project, which means converting smarty templates and php to utf8 and use proper utf8 tags in your html header.

HTML 4.01:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

HTML5:

<meta charset="UTF-8">