PHP DOMDocument loadHTML not encoding UTF-8 correctly

Question

I\'m trying to parse some HTML using DOMDocument, but when I do, I suddenly lose my encoding (at least that is how it appears to me).

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Answer 1

This took me a while to figure out but here's my answer.

Before using DomDocument I would use file_get_contents to retrieve urls and then process them with string functions. Perhaps not the best way but quick. After being convinced Dom was just as quick I first tried the following:

$dom = new DomDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
if ($dom->loadHTMLFile($url) == false) { // read the url
    // error message
}
else {
    // process
}

This failed spectacularly in preserving UTF-8 encoding despite the proper meta tags, php settings and all the rest of the remedies offered here and elsewhere. Here's what works:

$dom = new DomDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$str = file_get_contents($url);
if ($dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($str, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8')) == false) {
}

etc. Now everything's right with the world. Hope this helps.