I am using the PHP SimpleXML way of working with XML files on my server. I only need to read the contents of the XML (I have no need to modify it) so I stuck to the simple and easy to use SimpleXML. But SimpleXML is having problems reading a certain XML file because it has some very strange characters. I get the following errors:
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: data/data.xml:348: parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 3 in C:\xampp\htdocs\VMP\xintel\analyzer.php on line 54 Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: Jardin al fte. Hall de recepcion, amplio living comedor. ocina comedor diario c in C:\xampp\htdocs\VMP\xintel\analyzer.php on line 54
I have no control of what goes into the XML file, so I can’t stop these characters from being added to the file. Also, I don’t know how to solve this issue. The file is supposed to be encoded in utf-8. So I tried things like decoding from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 and the reverse, but nothing is happening.
Can somebody help me out? Should I try to change the encoding? Should I try to remove those characters? Anything?
Edit: The stangre characters are all box-drawing characters (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters)
I have an app that receives XML from untrusted sources, many of which send me unencoded ampersands. To solve the problem, I have an intermediate filter that does a single linear pass and gets rid of / encodes characters where necessary. I don’t know if that is possible for you but I think it’s a pretty reasonable solution.