How to prevent Drupal 7 from converting & to & - drupal

Question

I'm adding placeholder to search form like this:
$form['search_block_form']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = ' Search';
But problem is that drupal is printing & sign as & so in HTML output
for placeholder attribute instead of:
placeholder=" Search"
I'm getting:
placeholder=" Search"
How to prevent this behavior or is there another way to print that character by it's hex value? Tried using:
[] and decode_entities('') and some other functions, but none of them helped.

Answer 1

I think you were close with decode_entities(), but you could try the PHP function html_entity_decode().
However, unless the field you are trying to add the place holder to is called 'search_block_form', I think it is your construct which is wrong.
If you are doing this is a hook_form_alter() (which you should be if you are writing it like this) and the field you want to add the placeholder to is called "my_text_field", then the function should look for like this:
function custom_module_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
if ($form_id == 'custom_form') {
$form['my_text_field']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = html_entity_decode(' Search');
}
}
Just remember to replace 'custom_form' with the real ID of your form and 'my_text_field' with the name of your field you want to alter.
/**** EDIT ****/
Finally understood what you are trying to do. To get this working on my site I had to lay my form item out like this:
$form['test'] = array(
'#type' => 'textfield',
'#attributes' => array(
'placeholder' => html_entity_decode(''),
'style' => array('font-family: Arial, FontAwesome;'),
),
);
The important thing to add is the style attribute of font family and make sure it includes FontAwesome.
So the above example for you would become:
function custom_module_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
if ($form_id == 'custom_form') {
$form['my_text_field']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = html_entity_decode(' Search');
$form['my_text_field']['#attributes']['style'] = 'font-family: Arial, FontAwesome;';
}
}
Not sure how you have added the JS for Font Awesome, but I added it in a page alter using drupal_add_js() so that I could make sure it only get loaded on the pages its required.
Let me know how that works out for you, and don't forget the flush your caches too!