Reading in Malformed XML (unencoded XML entities) with PHP

Question

I\'m having some trouble parsing malformed XML in PHP. In particular I\'m querying a third party webservice that returns data in an XML format without encoding the XML enti

Answer 1

1. Read the content as a string.
2. htmlspecialchars(preg_replace('/[\x-\x8\xb-\xc\xe-\x1f]/','',$string))
3. Load the transformed string in SimpleXMLElement

It worked for me so far.

Answer 2

Try tidy.repairString:

php > $tidy = new tidy();
php > $repaired = $tidy->repairString("<foo>I <3 Philadelphia</foo>", array("input-xml"=>1));
php > print($repaired);
<foo>I &lt;3 Philadelphia</foo>
php > $el = new SimpleXMLElement($repaired);