Hi all,
I'm facing a nasty encoding issue when transforming XML via XSLT through PHP.
The problem can be summarised/dumbed down as follows: when I copy a (UTF-8 encoded) XHTML file with an XSLT stylesheet, some characters are displayed wrong. When I just show the same XHTML file, all characters come out correctly.
Following files illustrate the problem:
XHTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>encoding test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is how we dïßπλǽ ‘special characters’</p>
</body>
</html>
XSLT
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8"/>
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
PHP
<?php
$xml_file = 'encoding_test.xml';
$xsl_file = 'encoding_test.xsl';
$xml_doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$xml_doc->load($xml_file);
$xsl_doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$xsl_doc->load($xsl_file);
$xp = new XsltProcessor();
$xp->importStylesheet($xsl_doc);
// alllow to bypass XSLT transformation with bypass=true request parameter
if ($bypass = $_GET['bypass']) {
echo file_get_contents($xml_file);
}
else {
echo $xp->transformToXML($xml_doc);
}
?>
When this script is invoked as such (via e.g. http://localhost/encoding_test/encoding_test.php), all characters in the transformed XHTML document come out ok, except for the ‘ and ’ character entities (they're opening and closing single quotation marks). I'm not a Unicode expert, but two things strike me:
- all other character entities are interpreted correctly (which could imply something about the UTF-8-ness of
‘and’) - yet, when the XHTML file is displayed unmediated (via e.g. http://localhost/encoding_test/encoding_test.php?bypass=true), all characters are displayed properly.
I think I've declared UTF-8 encoding for the output anywhere I could. Do others perhaps see what's wrong and can be righted?
Thanks in advance!
Ron Van den Branden