PHP Encode string as HTML

Question

I have this code below, which comes from Wordpress Core file /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-posts-list-table.php

  printf(
    '<a class="row-title" href="%s" aria-label="%s">%s%s</a>',
    get_edit_post_link( $post->ID ),
    /* translators: %s: post title */
    esc_attr( sprintf( __( '&#8220;%s&#8221; (Edit)' ), $title )),
    $pad,
    $title
  );

In my case the variable $title contains iconfont HTML i.e.

  <i class="fa fa-heart"></i> 

The PHP code is making the web browser display the HTML characters as a string rather than what I'm after which is to display as HTML and render the Font Awesome Icon.

Ive tried wrapping $title in

htmlentities()
html_entity_decode()
htmlspecialchars()

Can some one help thanx

Answer 1

Where did you use html_entity_decode? I've tried this:

printf(
    '<a class="row-title" href="%s" aria-label="%s">%s%s</a>',
    get_edit_post_link( $post->ID ),
    /* translators: %s: post title */
    esc_attr( sprintf( __( '&#8220;%s&#8221; (Edit)' ), $title )),
    $pad,
    html_entity_decode($title)
  );

and seems it works.

But this is BAD idea to change core file. You can try to write (or find) some plugin that allows to add icons to particular post title but not to all post and without changing original file.