Question

I’m making an api call to a site using the code as shown below :

 $xmlData = file_get_contents("http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key=XXXXXX&index1=isbn&value1=0596002068");

 echo $xmlData;

However xmlData when displayed on the browser is auto parsed to HTML. For e.g. The element <title> of the returned XML which is actually a book title is converted to HTML essentially becoming the page title, and the other XML elements are displayed as plain text without the tags. I want the client side XMLHttpRequest Object to get raw XML data from the server side.

Why does this happen and how do I ensure that XML is not auto parsed?

Answer 1

PHP just sees it as text. For instance, do echo "<b>Bold</b>"; and it will “automatically” be in bold. It is the browser that processes the HTML and renders it.

This is what htmlspecialchars is for.