Question

Simple question. Is it possible to add a block of HTML in a SimpleXMLElement (or as a matter of fact, DOMDocument) node without auto-converting the HTML data into entity format?

For example, take this snippet (with DOMDocument here, but SimpleXMLElement behaves exactly the same):

<?php
$dom = new DOMDocument( '1.0', 'utf-8' );
$de = $dom->createElement( 'content', '<p>some <a>stuff</a></p>' );
$dom->appendChild( $de );
echo $dom->saveXML();
?>

The output is:

<p>some <a>stuff</a></p>

If you take a look at the source, you’ll see:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<content>&lt;p&gt;some &lt;a&gt;stuff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

… the HTML block got auto converted into the entity format.

Even wrapping the block with CDATA doesn’t help, as the angular brackets of CDATA gets converted too.

So, is there a way to add HTML blocks like this without performing this auto-conversion?

Thanks,
m^e

Answer 1

The problem is that you are creating an XML document and SimpleXMLElement creates valid mark-up.

The original HTML tags are not valid XML and thus filtered out.

To create a CDATA section you could try DOMDocument::createCDATASection