PHP encoding with DOMDocument

Question

<tag>
Алекс М
</tag>

When I try to get the content of the following code using DOMDocument functions, it returns something like:

ÐÐ»ÐµÐºÑ Ðœ

I've tried setting DOMDocument encoding to different values (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1), using mb_convert_encoding, iconv and utf8_encode but without success.

How can I get "Алекс М" instead of "ÐÐ»ÐµÐºÑ Ðœ" ?

EDIT: The input is coming from a page loaded with curl. When I output the page content to my browser, the characters are displayed correctly (so I doubt the input is the problem).

Answer 1

One likely problem is whether the source of the data is being input correctly. Where is the data coming from?

A file? Is the editor saving with the correct encoding?
A web form? Is it getting mangled before being passed to DOMDocument?

Answer 2

Try:

$string = file_get_contents('your-xml-file.xml');
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'utf-8', mb_detect_encoding($string));
// if you have not escaped entities use
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'html-entities', 'utf-8'); 
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($string);