PHP SimpleXML doesn't preserve line breaks in XML attributes

Question

I have to parse externally provided XML that has attributes with line breaks in them. Using SimpleXML, the line breaks seem to be lost. According to another stackoverflow

Answer 1

The entity for a new line is . I played with your code until I found something that did the trick. It's not very elegant, I warn you:

//First remove any indentations:
$xml = str_replace("     ","", $xml);
$xml = str_replace("\t","", $xml);

//Next replace unify all new-lines into unix LF:
$xml = str_replace("\r","\n", $xml);
$xml = str_replace("\n\n","\n", $xml);

//Next replace all new lines with the unicode:
$xml = str_replace("\n","
", $xml);

Finally, replace any new line entities between >< with a new line:
$xml = str_replace(">
<",">\n<", $xml);

The assumption, based on your example, is that any new lines that occur inside a node or attribute will have more text on the next line, not a < to open a new element.

This of course would fail if your next line had some text that was wrapped in a line-level element.