I`ve never been clear on when, where or why to use echo html entities versus just a simple echo statement.

Could someone advise?

Does it mean for example that if I am echoing a block of text which contains quotation marks (ex. Elvis "The King" Presley) html entities will render the quotations in HTML friendly format? (ex. Elvis "The King" Presley)

??

I currently have a problem where I`m trying to do something like that.
I want to echo a text block into the title tag but HTML interprest the first quotation marks it encounters as the end of the title attribute.
Should I be using html entities for this?

thnks

I use htmlentites() to output text with double quotes into tag attributes, e.g. <a title=""> or <input value=""> because double quotes may break the page rendering. Echoing text with double quotes into tags theirselves, like <title> or <p> or <textarea> cannot do any harm, so htmlentities() is not neccessary in this case. Also you need to use htmlentities() if you output text that can possibly contain html and you want this html to be shown as text and not rendered by the browser, e.g. when you want to place an example of code on your page.

Use all functions wisely. None of them will do what you want if you simply pass EVERYTHING through it.

Should I be using html entities for this?

Yes

or htmlspecialchars()

htmlentities will convert ALL ASCII characters that have an "entity" equivalent specialchars will only convert the ", ', &, <, > characters.