Decoding of html entities in title does not work properly

[paxter]

Using: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13950332/

Test code

$imdb = new \Imdb\Title(13950332);
echo $imdb->title();

Getting

While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government

Expecting

While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government

I took a look into the code and I could identify the following line in the title_year() function:

imdbphp/src/Imdb/Title.php

Line 236 in 0074d4c

$this->main_title = htmlspecialchars_decode($match['title']);

To get it working properly I replaced the line with:

$this->main_title = html_entity_decode($match['title'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

I'm not sure if this is the proper or best solution, but it worked in my case. There are some other usages of htmlspecialchars_decode() in that function I have replaced too.

[tboothman]

Imdb seems to be only escaping characters that mean something to html, so I think htmlspecialchars_decode is an appropriate function to use here. Non ascii characters are represented as UTF-8.
Seems like a silly mistake in PHP someone made a long time ago probably with good intentions to exclude single quotes from these functions .. it's been fixed very recently though https://php.watch/versions/8.1/html-entity-default-value-changes

php > $a = '&"''';
php > echo htmlspecialchars_decode($a);
&"''
php > echo html_entity_decode($a);
&"''
php > echo html_entity_decode($a, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
&"''
php > echo htmlspecialchars_decode($a, ENT_QUOTES);
&"''

Some examples of <title> elements:

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Forhøret
"Firefly" The Train Job (TV Episode 2002)
While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government

[paxter]

Thanks for your fast reply. Your provided solution is working for me too. 👍