PHP, SimpleXML, CDATA and HTML entities

Question

I have some XML which contains CDATA.

For example the title: <title><![CDATA[School’s Latest News]]></title>

When I parse the full XML document with simplexml_load_string, I am able to access the CDATA values using (string). So for example, I get the title:

$title = (string)$news_xml -> {'news'} -> {'title'}

The problem I have is that the ’ is not presented as a ' but instead as â€™

If I use html_entity_decode, I get the exact same thing.

If I use the LIBXML_NOCDATA option when calling simplexml_load_string I am able to look at the CDATA using print_r and don't have to explicitly call (string), but my HTML entities are still coming out garbled.

Any ideas why this isn't working?

The ' is represented as its unicode value (0x8217): rsquo.net — Bart Friederichs
– Bart Friederichs, Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 11:33
Just to quash a recurrent myth of SimpleXML, which you've mostly avoided anyway, there is absolutely no reason to set LIBXML_NOCDATA with SimpleXML. There are many aspects of a SimpleXML object that print_r cannot see, because it is not a "real" PHP object, but a wrapper around lower-level data - a limitation of print_r, not of SimpleXML. You could try one of these instead: github.com/IMSoP/simplexml_debug — IMSoP
– IMSoP, Commented Dec 11, 2012 at 23:45

Bart Friederichs · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-06 11:35:09Z

1

’ is a unicode character (value 0x8217), see also http://www.rsquo.net/

If you send it to a browser (as I reckon you mean by presented as), make sure the encoding of the page is set to UTF-8.

answered Dec 6, 2012 at 11:35

Bart Friederichs

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2 Comments

Matt McDonald Over a year ago

That was it. But then why does utf8_decode output the character as a ?

Bart Friederichs Over a year ago

@mattm591 no idea, probably because it has no equivalent for ’ in ISO-8859-1. Note that ’ is not ' but ´. It is a different character, with a different meaning.

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