The CHtml class contains an "encode" method, that simply returns the result of the PHP function htmlspecialchars. If we wish to reverse this process,
(this is the case for me when using the text title of an object as its URL, when I don’t wish to store that text encoded - for example, a post has a title “tricks in Yii”, and it should be accessed by the URL “posts/tricks+in+Yii”, my CUrlManager rule is “posts/<post>” => “post/read”, in the “read” action I must then decode the “post” parameter that is passed by the rule in order to pass it as a condition to find my post object),
we can use the PHP function htmlspecialchars_decode.
However, in the interests of consistency, and to safeguard against any future modifications to the "encode" function, I believe we should also have a "decode" function that returns the result from htmlspecialchars_decode in the CHtml class.