simplyXML and accented characters in PHP

Question

I have written an XML file which is using the ISO-8859-15 encoding and most of the data within the feed is ran through htmlspecialchars().

I am then using simplyxml_load_string() to retrieve the contents of the XML file to use in my script. However, if I have any special characters (ie: é á ó) it comes out as "é á ó". The

How can I get my script to display the proper special accented characters?

Answer 1

You’re probably using a different character encoding for you output than the XML data is actually encoded.

According to your description, your XML data encoded with UTF-8 but your output is using ISO 8859-15. Because UTF-8 encodes the character é (U+00E9) with 0xC3A9 and that represents the two characters à and © respectively in ISO 8859-15.

So you either use UTF-8 for your output as well. Or you convert the data from UTF-8 to ISO 8859-15 using mb_convert_encoding.