Question

I’m creating an RSS feed for a site.

I am using SimpleXML to create the XML structure. When I call $xml->asXML();, it throws many warnings:

ErrorException [ Warning ]: SimpleXMLElement::asXML() [simplexmlelement.asxml]: string is not in UTF-8

I’m not sure what this error is. The database table it is reading from is utf8_general_ci. I tried running utf_encode on the string which messed up the strings instead of fixing it.

//First create the XML root
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<rss version="2.0"></rss>');

//Create the Channel
$channel = $xml->addChild('channel');

//Construct the feed parameters
$channel->addChild('title', 'CGarchitect Feed');
$channel->addChild('link', Config::get('base_url'));
$channel->addChild('description', 'CGarchitect is the leading online community for architectural visualization professionals.');
$channel->addChild('pubDate', date("D, d M Y H:i:s T"));

//Get the feed items

$nodes = <....snip... >

foreach ($nodes as $node)
{

    //Parse the title and description
    $title = htmlentities(strip_tags($node->title));
    $description = htmlentities(strip_tags($node->description));
    $newItem = $channel->addChild('item');
    $newItem->addChild('title', $title);
    $newItem->addChild('description', $description);
    $newItem->addChild('pubDate', date("D, d M Y H:i:s T", $node->published_at));

}

header('Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml');
echo $xml->asXML();

Thanks in advance…

Leonard

Answer 1

I was able to reproduce your problem replacing your $nodes … snippet with

class myNode {

    public $title="(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻";
    public $description="dscr";
    public $published_at=0;

    public function __construct(){
        $this->published_at=time();
    }

}

$nodes = array(new myNode());

Simply removing the calls to htmlentities seemed to work fine. (The output was properly escaped as character entities)