can you please provide an example that exibits the bug in the function?

Correction and clarification:

The PHP4 function example gets confused if you use a decimal 
HTML entity with a leading zero, e.g. ' instead of 
'

For example, the following code should really output a 
single quote character but actually outputs nothing -

<?php

// For users prior to PHP 4.3.0 you may do this:
function unhtmlentities($string) 
{
   // replace numeric entities
   $string = preg_replace('~&#x([0-9a-f]+);~ei', 'chr(hexdec
("\\1"))', $string);
   $string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr(\\1)', 
$string);
   // replace literal entities
   $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
   $trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl);
   return strtr($string, $trans_tbl);
}

echo unhtmlentities('&#039;');

?>

To correct this, changing the following line from

$string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr(\\1)', 
$string);

to

$string = preg_replace('~&#([0-9]+);~e', 'chr("\\1")', 
$string);

is adequate (double quotes added around \\1).

A similar fix could no doubt be provided for the preceding 
line in the function, also.

This bug has been fixed in the documentation's XML sources. Since the
online and downloadable versions of the documentation need some time
to get updated, we would like to ask you to be a bit patient.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make our documentation better.