PHP function to convert from html codes to normal chars - php

Question

I have a string like this:
La Torre Eiffel paragonata all’Everest
What PHP function should I use to convert the ’ to the actual "normal" char ':
La Torre Eiffel paragonata all’Everest
I'm using CURL to fetch a page and this page has that string in it but for some reason the HTML chars are not decoded.
The my_url test page is an Italian blog with iso characters, and all the apostrophes are encoded in html code like above.
$output = curl_download($my_url);
$output = htmlspecialchars_decode($output);
function curl_download($Url){
// is cURL installed yet?
if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
die('Sorry cURL is not installed!');
}
// OK cool - then let's create a new cURL resource handle
$ch = curl_init();
// Now set some options (most are optional)
// Set URL to download
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $Url);
// Set a referer
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.example.org/yay.htm");
// User agent
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MozillaXYZ/1.0");
// Include header in result? (0 = yes, 1 = no)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
// Should cURL return or print out the data? (true = return, false = print)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Timeout in seconds
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
// Download the given URL, and return output
$output = curl_exec($ch);
// Close the cURL resource, and free system resources
curl_close($ch);
return $output;
}

Answer 1

html_entity_decode. From the php.net manual: html_entity_decode() is the opposite of htmlentities() in that it converts all HTML entities in the string to their applicable characters.

Answer 2

try this
echo html_entity_decode('La Torre Eiffel paragonata all’Everest',ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');
so in your code change this
$output = curl_download($my_url);
$output = htmlspecialchars_decode($output);
to
$output = curl_download($my_url);
$output = html_entity_decode($output,ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');