html_entity_decode not having any effect

Question

I've read other questions here but none of the answers seems to fix this issue

my MySQL query brings back "Dino's"

$var = Dino& # 39; s; (no spaces);

I need to convert that ''' (no spaces) to "'" a single quote/apostrophe

I have tried the following and none seems to work.

$var = html_entity_decode( $var, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8' );
$var = html_entity_decode( $var, ENT_COMPAT, 'ISO-8859-1' );
$var = html_entity_decode( $var );

Only when I add this line will the remainder of my script work.

$var = str_replace( ''', "'", $var );  

Obviously I may need to to function for other html_entities so I need a solution other than that just above.

What am I overlooking, please?

Answer 1

Use at least ENT_QUOTES or similar instead of ENT_COMPAT.
As your goal is to convert the (single)-quotes from the html_entity back to character-representation. ENT_COMPAT won't convert single-quotes.

onlinephp.io Demonstration

From php.net:

Constant Name	Description
ENT_COMPAT	Will convert double-quotes and leave single-quotes alone.
ENT_QUOTES	Will convert both double and single quotes.
ENT_NOQUOTES	Will leave both double and single quotes unconverted.
ENT_SUBSTITUTE	Replace invalid code unit sequences with a Unicode Replacement Character U+FFFD (UTF-8) or � (otherwise) instead of returning an empty string.
ENT_HTML401	Handle code as HTML 4.01.
ENT_XML1	Handle code as XML 1.
ENT_XHTML	Handle code as XHTML.
ENT_HTML5	Handle code as HTML 5.