PHP simplexml Entities

Question

What's going one here?

$string = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <album>
        <img src="002.jpg" caption="w&aacute;ssup?" />
    </album>
XML;

$xml = simplexml_load_string($string);
// $xmlobj = simplexml_load_file("xml.xml"); // same thing

echo "<pre>";
var_dump($xml);
echo "</pre>";

Error:

Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: Entity: line 5: parser error : Entity 'aacute' not defined

Answer 1

&aacute is not an XML entity - you're thinking about HTML.

Special characters are usually used "as is" in XML - an html_entity_decode() on the input data (don't forget to specify UTF-8 as the character set) should do the trick:

$string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, "utf-8");

Answer 2

i had this problem the other day. any occurrence of & will need to be inside a CDATA tag

<album>
    <img src="002.jpg" />
    <caption><![CDATA[now you can put whatever characters you need & include html]]></caption>
</album> 

to keep the parser from failing.

Answer 3

You may want to look at Matt Robinson's article on an alternative method: Converting named entities to numeric in PHP . It mentions the html_entity_decode method (already pointed out by another answer) and some potential pitfalls:

There are two possible problems with this approach. The first is invalid entities: html_entity_decode() won't touch them, which means you'll still get XML errors. The second is encoding. I suppose it's possible that you don't actually want UTF-8. You should, because it's awesome, but maybe you have a good reason. If you don't tell html_entity_decode() to use UTF-8, it won't convert entities that don't exist in the character set you specify. If you tell it to output in UTF-8 and then use something like iconv() to convert it, then you'll lose any characters that aren't in the output encoding.

Also, if you find the script rather cumbersome, you can also use the one shared on SourceRally.