 <p>That's an HTML specific encoding so:</p> <pre><code>echo html_entity_decode('f&amp;#252;r'); // returns für </code></pre> <p><a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php" rel="nofollow">http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php</a></p>