Illegal character in Xml

Answer 1

This is wrong:

    $current = ord($value{$i});
    if (($current == 0x9) ||
        ($current == 0xA) ||
        ($current == 0xD) ||
        (($current >= 0x20) && ($current <= 0xD7FF)) ||
        (($current >= 0xE000) && ($current <= 0xFFFD)) ||
        (($current >= 0x10000) && ($current <= 0x10FFFF)))
    {
        if($current != 0x1F)
            $ret .= chr($current);
    }

ord() never returns anything bigger than 0xFF since it works in a byte-by-byte manner.

I'm guessing your XML is invalid because the file contains an invalid UTF-8 sequence (indeed , i.e., 0xFFFF, is invalid in UTF-8). This probably comes from copy-paste of different XML files that have different encodings.

I suggest you use the DOM extension instead to do your XML mash-up, which handles different encodings automatically by converting them internally to UTF-8.

Answer 2

You are trying to perform character transcoding. Don't do it by yourself, use the PHP library.

I found iconv quite useful:

$cleanText = iconv('UTF-8','ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $srcText);

This code translates from utf-8 to iso-8859, trying to remap the 'exotic' characters and ignoring the ones that can not be transcoded.

I'm just guessing the source encoding is utf-8. You have to discover which encoding the incoming data is using and translate in the one you are declaring in the XML header.

A linux command line tool that guesses a file's encoding is enca

Answer 3

I think I was looking down the wrong path - rather than an encoding issue character was an HTML entity representing the 'squared' symbol. As the descriptions in the URL only exist for search enging purposes I can safely remove all htmlentities with the following regex:

$content = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]+;/i","",$content);