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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T03:52:14+00:00

I’m allowing some user input on my website, that later is read in XML.

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I’m allowing some user input on my website, that later is read in XML. Every once in a while I get these weird single or double quotes like this ”’. These are directly copied from the source that broke my XML. I’m wondering if there is an easy way to correct these types of characters in my xml. htmlentities did not seem to touch them.

Where do these characters come from? I’m not even sure how I’d go about typing them out unintentionally.

EDIT- I forgot to clarify these quotes are not being used in attributes, but in the following way:

<SomeTag>User’s Input</SomeTag>
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  1. Editorial Team

    Don’t disallow and/or modify foreign characters; that’s just annoying for your users! This is just an encoding issue. I don’t know what parser you’re using to read the XML, but if it’s reasonably sophisticated, you can solve your problem by including the following encoding pragma at the top of your XML files:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

    There may also be a UTF-8 option in the parser’s API.

    Edit: I just read that you’re reading the XML directly in a browser. Most browsers listen to the encoding pragma!

    Edit 2: Apparently, those quotes aren’t even legal in UTF-8, so ignore what I said above. Instead, you might find what you’re looking for here, where a similar problem is being discussed.

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