Question

I’m trying to parse an xml file that contains accents, but I get this error “String could not be parsed as XML”.
Unfortunately I can’t work on the xml file, as it is downloaded from an external source, so I was wondering if there’s any easy way to fix it.

Here’s my code:

<?php
$requestAddress = "test.xml";

// Gets data
$xml_str = file_get_contents($requestAddress,0);

// Parses XML
$xml = new SimplexmlElement($xml_str);
?>

I have looked all around but I can’t see any solution to the problem, or at least I don’t understand them! 🙂

Answer 1

My guess is that file_get_contents() does not take into account the encoding of the file. Your accents might be considered as invalid characters and break the XML structure.

Use mb_detect_encoding() to detect the encoding.

Use utf8_encode() to convert your characters to UTF-8.