php output xml produces parse error “’”

Question

Is there any function that I can use to parse any string to ensure it won\'t cause xml parsing problems? I have a php script outputting a xml file with content obtained from

Answer 1

The problem is that your htmlentities function is doing what it should - generating HTML entities from characters. You're then inserting these into an XML document which doesn't have the HTML entities defined (things like ’ are HTML-specific).

The easiest way to handle this is keep all input raw (i.e. don't parse with htmlentities), then generate your XML using PHP's XML functions.

This will ensure that all text is properly encoded, and your XML is well-formed.

Example:

$user_input = "...<>&'";

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0','utf-8');

$element = $doc->createElement("content");
$element->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($user_input));

$doc->appendChild($element);