Question

I’m creating a sitemap and my problem is that all & in links gets changed to &

I’ve already created a function to fix this, and it works in other parts of my site, but the url in the XML document will not change.

This section htmlspecialchars($query_string); is the problem.
I’ve tested with:

• esc_url (wordpress)
• urlencode
• htmlentities
• htmlspecialchars

Here’s my code

public function buildSiteMap($type = '', $num = '30') {
    include_once(INCLUDE_DIR.'library.php');

    $result   = parent::buildSiteMap($type, $num);
    $entity   = str_replace('sl_','',$type);

    $xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<urlset></urlset>');
    $xml->addAttribute('encoding', 'UTF-8');
    $xml->addAttribute('xmlns', 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9');


    foreach($result as $res):
      $name = str_replace(' ','+',$res['name']);
      $query_string = $entity.'='.$name.'&'.$entity.'id='.$res['id'];
      $url = home_url().'/'.$entity.'/?'.urlencode($query_string);

      $make = $xml->addChild('url');
      $make->addChild('loc',$url);
      $make->addChild('priority','0.80');
      $make->addChild('changefreq','monthly');
    endforeach;

    $dir = get_template_directory();
    $xml->asXML($dir.'/'.$entity.'.xml');
  }

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

That sounds correct: & is a reserved character in XML:

The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) may appear in their literal form only when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings “&” and “<” respectively.

it’s probably the XML library’s doing, not your escape functions’.

This is essentially correct and the XML parser that reads the file should decode it back.

If it somehow doesn’s work for you, wrap the URL field in CDATA tags.