php a good way to read from a file

Question

i have a txt file with a list of country's. For my form i just read all the data in a select list line per line with fgets(). And that works fine except for some problems.

1) When i have a country with ¨ on a letter it comes in the list just as a blank. 2) When i put the data in an xml at the end it seams there is a return at the end of each value in the form of '&#xD'.

so my question. Is there either a way to fix these problems or is there a better way to read data from a file. Or should i use on other filetype then txt?

Answer 1

It sounds like a trouble with the text encoding. You could try to run htmlentities on the text before echo:ing it out. Another solution is to use utf8_encode or utf8_decode (depending on which encoding your pages are served as, and on the encoding of the file).

Answer 2

In character data, the carriage-return (#xD) character is represented by 


Just make sure that after you've read each line, you str_replace('\r', '', $line) each line to remove the carriage-return character from the end of the line.