Unable to replace & with & in XML uses Preg_replace in PHP

Question

Hi,

Need help here. Am not able to replace the '&' with '&' uses Preg_replace in PHP. But, if I do it manually (edited) on the xml file, it works out fine.

Here are the sample:

$XMLCharactersPreg = "/[&<>\"\'()^*@+]/";
$XMLPregReplace = "&amp;";
$d_Description = "50% offer & 20% further reduction for member";

if (preg_match($XMLCharactersPreg, $d_Description)) {
    echo "A match was found.";
    $XMLDealDescription = preg_replace($XMLCharactersPreg , $XMLPregReplace, $d_Description);
    echo "$XMLDealDescription <br / >";

} else {
    echo "A match was not found.";
}

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why not use htmlspecialchars?

$XMLDealDescription = htmlspecialchars($d_Description, ENT_QUOTES);

The code then becomes:

$d_Description = "50% offer & 20% further reduction for member"; 

$XMLDealDescription =  htmlspecialchars($d_Description, ENT_QUOTES);
echo "$XMLDealDescription <br / >"; 

This code works fine - the output is:

> g:\Program Files\PHP>php Test\test.php.txt
50% offer &amp; 20% further reduction for member <br / >

Any other errors you get (such as XML well-formedness) is likely due to an error somewhere else in your code. (Also, the <br / > tag seems to have a space between the / and the > which isn't needed).

Answer 2

Are you perhaps looking at the result in a browser, which would display & as &? So the source contains &, but you only see & in the browser.