PHP: XML Parsing with probably invalid content

Question

I need a template-engine for a project, that parses sgml-content and converts user-defined tags like <ext:grid />. In nearly every case, the input-content is valid. A common problem is the link-generator. The link-generator produces & instead of & which is the main cause of my parsing-problems. I cant change this behavior, because the output of that generator is used in many other situations where the links are required to have an & instead of &.

I have tried DOMDocument, SimpleXML and xml_parser. They all exit on entity problems. Any ideas? All I want is, that this "problem" gets simply ignored by the parser.

Where is a test-template:

<template xmlns:grid="templates/grid" xmlns:std="templates/std">
    <std:header text="Overview" type="h1" />
    <grid:base width="100%">
        <grid:columns>
        <grid:body>
            <?php foreach($products as $product): /* @var $product Dfm_Shop_Model_Product */ ?>
            <grid:row selectable="1">
                <grid:cell>
                    <div><?php echo $this->esc($product->getTitle()) ?></div>
                </grid:cell>
                <grid:cell>
                    <a href="<?php env()->http()->to(array('controller' => 'Dfm_Shop_Controller_Products', 'method' => 'showEdit')) ?>"><std:img src="icons/pencil.png" hint="Edit" /></a>
                </grid:cell>
            </grid:row>
            <?php endforeach ?>
        </grid:body>
    </grid:base>
</template>

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:27:05Z

1

Can you just search-replace your & to & before trying to parse the document?

Edit: Just to add for the completeness, there's for example QueryPath that can handle invalid tags, too.

According to the thread linked above, libxml functions should've also worked.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:27

CommunityBot

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answered Oct 24, 2012 at 14:14

eis

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4 Comments

Ron Over a year ago

preg_replace would consume too much performance. A simple str_replace would replace & with &amp;. I should try strtr for this...

eis Over a year ago

you can first str_replace & to &, and then replace back :) that would of course fail with any other proper xml entities, like ' ...

Ron Over a year ago

$content = strtr($content, array('&' => '&', '&' => '&')); does the trick

Ron Over a year ago

This problem is actually that your XML is not XML at all, but something close to it. The content is virtually correct xml. Now DOMDocument can parse the document without any problems.

kwelsan · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-24 14:09:03Z

0

If you can, try to use cdata with xml.

<![CDATA[your content]]>

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp

answered Oct 24, 2012 at 14:09

kwelsan

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2 Comments

Ron Over a year ago

That would require me to all CDATA everywhere I used my link-generator. That would be the same if I would just use htmlentities around the link-generator. Too easy to forget :/

kwelsan Over a year ago

But it can solve your problem permanently. To build a good system we need to do some extra efforts.

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