Converting HTML entities to characters

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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.

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