Php Htmlentities And Saving The Data In Xml Format

Im trying to save some data into a xml file using the following PHP script: Go to google maps and some special charac

Solution 1:

Try to remove the line:

$string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Because the text passed to createTextNode() is escaped anyway.

Update: If you want the utf-8 characters to be escaped. You could leave that line and try to add the $string directly in createElement().

For example:

$title = $doc->createElement('title', $string);
$title = $root->appendChild($title);

In PHP documentation it says that $string will not be escaped. I haven't tried it, but it should work.

Solution 2:

It is the htmlentities that turns a & into & When working with xml data you should not use htmlentities, as the DOMDocument will handle a & and not &.

As of php 5.3 the default encoding is UTF-8, so there is no need to convert to UTF-8.

Solution 3:

This line:

$string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

… encodes a string as HTML.

This line:

$text = $doc->createTextNode($string);

… encodes your string of HTML as XML.

This gives you an XML representation of an HTML string. When the XML is parsed you get the HTML back.

how can I prevent this from happening?

If your goal is to store some text in an XML document. Remove the line that encodes it as HTML.

Looks like a double encoding.

Pretty much. It is encoded twice, it just uses different (albeit very similar) encoding methods for each of the two passes.