array_map and htmlentities

Question

I've been trying using array_map to convert characters to HTML entities with htmlentities() like this:

$lang = array_map('htmlentities', $lang);

My array looks like this:

$lang = array();
$lang['var_char1']['varchar2'] = 'Some Text';

But I keep getting this errors:

Warning: htmlentities() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /home/user/public_html/foo/lang/en.inc.php on line 1335

Does anyone know what could be the problem? Thank you!

Solution 1

Because $lang is a two dimensional array, so it won't work

For two dimensional array you need to use for loop

foreach($$lang as &$l):
    $l = array_map('htmlentities', $l);
}

Solution 2

Use array_walk_recursive. array_map doesn't work with multidimensional arrays:

array_walk_recursive($lang, function (&$value) {
    $value = htmlentities($value);
});

Solution 3

$lang['var_char1']['varchar2'] defines a multidimensional array, so each element of $lang is also an array. array_map() iterates through $lang, passing an array to htmlentities() instead of a string.

Solution 4

Each element in $lang is an array, so the function you pass to array_map should take an array as an argument. That is not the case for 'htmlentities' which takes a string.

You can:

$map_htmlentities = function(array) { return array_map('htmlentities', array); };

and then

$lang = array_map($map_htmlentities, $lang);

From PHP 7.4 on you can use lambdas:

$lang = array_map(fn($arr) => array_map('htmlentities', $arr), $lang);

Solution 5

array_map() doesn't work recursively. If you know your array is always two levels deep you could loop through it and use array_map on the sub-arrays.

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