html_entity_decode not decoding ASCII

Question

Heres my code:

$string = '&#73&#116';
$string = html_entity_decode($string);
echo $string;

It should be echoing "It", but its just echoing the ASCII codes. Am I using the wrong function? I also tried htmlspecialchars_decode and it changes nothing.

Answer 1

Those are not valid entities Actually, they are valid in HTML 4 (and I suppose HTML5 too), but in this case the entities need to be semicolon-terminated for PHP to recognize them:

$string = 'It';

htmlspecialchars_decode() only decodes <, >, &, ' and " (and the last two depend on the quotes flag).