I was trying to use WordPress post titles as email subject headers in such a way:
$subject = get_the_title(); wp_mail( $to, $subject, $message);
However this became a problem when the post title included smart quotes, em-dash, ellipsis and the likes of them. My email subject ended up looking like this:
Hey – This is my Post’s Title
where it should have been:
Hey - This is my Post's Title
Well, I solved this by using the php function html_entity_decode before sending the $subject to wp_mail():
$subject = html_entity_decode( get_the_title(), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8' )
ENT_QUOTES denotes converting both double and single quotes. The last parameter defines the character set – it is set as UTF-8 since smart quotes and em-dashes are part of the UTF-8 set.
This is especially helpful if you are doing WPDB queries. For some reason, even though the output was correct, the query would result in nothing unless the ‘get_the_title()’ was properly decoded before passing through the query.
Great tip!