Question

What is the best practice for generating valid XML with PHP from user submitted text, e.g. eCommerce sales data with ampersands, angle brackets, non-ascii accent characters, new lines etc etc.

What functions, libraries, regexes do folks rely on?

Answer 1

Wrap information in CDATA tags and encode data with htmlentities()

'<tag><![CDATA[' . htmlentities($theData) . ']]></tag>'

Or using DOM

$dom = new DOMDocument("1.0", "utf-8");

/* ... */

$dom->createCDATASection(htmlentities($theData));