Question

My DB has some text which is probably copied and pasted from word document contains some curly quotes and curly apostrophes. PHP code is generating XML data/document with this text as one of its XML element.

This is the error I’m getting when I try to display the XMl doc

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 40 at column 1: Encoding error

Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

I’ve tried as mentioned in the post here, but it isn’t working for me. Also tried

$output = iconv(‘UTF-8’, ‘ASCII//TRANSLIT’, $input);

as mentioned here. This one displays the text till curly quotes or apostrophe appears. Do I need to mention any different character output format here?

Is there any function available in PHP to handle these type of special characters when generating XML document. I am using <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> character encoding for XML documnet

Here is some of my code

header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>';

$item = mysql_fetch_object($result);
<listitems>
    <item>
        <name><?=htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($item->name))?></name>
        <details><?=htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($item->details))?></details>
        .
        .
        .
        .

    </item>
</listitems>

Answer 1

on the table it says DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

It could be that you are fetching ISO-8859-1 data and outputting it as UTF-8. That would result in invalid characters beyond the 128 basic ASCII characters.

Try this iconv():

$output = iconv(‘ISO-8859-1’, ‘UTF-8//TRANSLIT’, $input);