Question

I met a strange problem yesterday, and wondered how it could be possible. I’m making a curl request with PHP on a “webservice” returning an XML document and I var_dump the result.

What I didn’t understand is that it displayed me string(160) “” which I understand this way : the variable your dumping is a string of 160 characters and is this “”. For me it’s as if php told me “your variable is white (it’s black)”.

Do you know what could make it happen (I use php 5.2.6) ?

Answer 1

I’m guessing you have only produced XML, without character data, e.g.:

var_dump('<something/>');

Try instead:

var_dump(htmlentities('<something/>'));

or, better yet, if you know the character set:

var_dump(htmlentities('<something/>', ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'));