PHP revert html special characters in txt file

Question

I currently have a txt file that looks like this:

ABCDEF
Blah’s Test
12344
Blah’s Test
Testing

I tried to convert the special characters into their actual characters, so for example, I attempted make the original txt file into this:

ABCDEF
Blah's Test
12344
Blah's Test
Testing

To do this I used html_entity_decode() however, instead of my expected results, I'm getting something like:

ABCDEF
Blah’s Test
12344
Blah’s Test
Testing

How can I fix my code to do what I want?

My code:

<?php
$items = file_get_contents('test1.txt');
$items = html_entity_decode($items);
file_put_contents("test2.txt", $items);
?>

Answer 1

It's the character set

html_entity_decode($a, ENT_QUOTES, 'cp1251');

Answer 2

Use the character encoding option.

html_entity_decode($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

Answer 3

What version of PHP are you using?

In versions prior to 5.4.0 The html_entity_decode() function defualts to ISO-8859-1 encoding. In version 5.4.0 and later it defaults to UTF-8 encoding. I suspect you are using an earlier version than 5.4.0. As a result, the UTF-8 characters you're using are not being properly decoded.

Try passing UTF-8 as a second parameter. See here for more info: http://www.php.net/html_entity_decode