Category: Web development

I needed to use the PHP function htmlspecialchars_decode( ) for a WordPress widget I am making. This function is built into PHP versions 5.1.0 and greater and is used to convert special HTML entities to characters. As defined, htmlspecialchars_decode( ) is the opposite of htmlspecialchars( ). Someone named Thomas commented on the PHP man page to point out a flaw in the definition. He also provides some code, which I have only modified slightly below to check function_exists( ).

if ( !function_exists('htmlspecialchars_decode') ){
    function htmlspecialchars_decode($string,$style=ENT_COMPAT)
    {
        $translation = array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS,$style));
        if($style === ENT_QUOTES){ $translation['''] = '\''; }
        return strtr($string,$translation);
    }
}

The <label> element will not accept a width value in FireFox, and I just spent way too long finding a workaround. The label element is used to associate a text label to a form control that does not automatically have a label.

Short answer: float left makes width work on label elements.

When assigning a width to the label tag, the width value worked in Internet Explorer. FireFox disregarded the width in pixels that I assigned to the label HTML tag in my CSS file.

Label elements are in-line style elements, so technically FireFox is interpreting the CSS properly by not obeying my width declaration. In-line elements do not accept width attributes. The workaround is to force the label element to become a block level element by floating it.

Why float it when you could just declare it a block element with display: block, you ask? Because block elements will stack on top of each other without being floated, and if my original intent was to give a label a width I might be trying to distance it from something beside and not below it. You can do display: block; float: left; and achieve the same result, but if you are going to float it the display attribute is not required.