PHP Htmlentities function not encoding string to database using PDO - php

Question

I have a string (foreign language) and I need to convert to htmlentities.
I'm runing a php script from my terminal on linux Ubuntu.
I need this:
$str = "Ettől a pillanattól kezdve,"
To become something like this:
EttЗl a pillanattßl kezdve,
$str = "Ettől a pillanattól kezdve,";
$strEncoded = htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
$cmd = $pdo->prepare("UPDATE table SET field = :a");
$cmd->bindValue(":a", $strEncoded);
$cmd->execute();
Database/Table Information:
Charset: utf8
Collation: utf8_general_ci
It is not saving as expected.
Obs: I know it's not the best practice to use htmlentities to save into database, but I need to do it this way.
Example 2:
$a = "Quantità totale delle";
$b = html_entity_decode($a);
echo $a; //output: Quantità totale delle
echo $b; //output: Quantità totale delle (Need the reverse)
echo htmlspecialchars($b, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') . "\n"; //output: Quantità totale delle (didn't convert the special character to `à`

Answer 1

To match the question, you have to rebuild the entity yourself using the dec value. This will works with strings like you specified:
<?php
$str = str_split("Ettől a pillanattól kezdve,");
foreach ($str as $k => $v){
echo "&#".ord($v).";";
}
// Ettől a pillanattól kezdve,
But this won't work for chars above 255.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ord.php
Interprets the binary value of the first byte of string as an unsigned
integer between 0 and 255.
If the string is in a single-byte encoding, such as ASCII, ISO-8859, or Windows 1252, this is equivalent to returning the
position of a character in the character set's mapping table. However,
note that this function is not aware of any string encoding, and in
particular will never identify a Unicode code point in a multi-byte
encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.