Question

I have a simple XML script like this:

$file='example.xml';
if (file_exists($file)) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($file);
    $f = fopen('newfile.csv', 'w');

    // array to hold the field names
    $headers = array(); 
    // loop through the first set of fields to get names
    foreach ($xml->Information->children() as $field) { 
        // put the field name into array
        $headers[] = $field->getName(); 
    }
    // print headers to CSV
    fputcsv($f, $headers, ',', '"');

    foreach ($xml->Information as $information) {
        fputcsv($f, get_object_vars($information), ',', '"');
    }
    fclose($f);
}

But if example.xml has a £ sign in it, then in newfile.csv it will show as £.

Is there any way to overcome this? I dont know the encoding of example.xml since it is a remote file that is wget’d in.

Answer 1

One way to do it is by detecting the encoding in the file, which you can do by processing the headers in a curl session. There should be a Content-Type. Otherwise, the xml specs, define utf-8 as the basic character set, so you can try to use that.

You may also use mb_detect_encoding if you don’t want to use curl, but I’ll try to use it first.

Then, if you want, you can use iconv or mb_convert_encoding to change the type from whatever it is to utf-8 or the charset you prefer and then save the file.

Bye