XML Error: Invalid character - php

Question

I have the below php code that is parsing xml from url
$parser=xml_parser_create();
function char($parser,$data)
{
echo $data;
}
xml_set_character_data_handler($parser,"char");
$fp=fopen("http://example.com","r");
while ($data=fread($fp,4096))
{
xml_parse($parser,$data,feof($fp)) or
die (sprintf("XML Error: %s at line %d",
xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($parser)));
}
The xml returned by above fopen call is like this.The Xml don't have any encoding set at top.
The above code is outputing XML Error: Invalid character at line 1008 on browser.
<entries> //root element
<entry>
<TITLE><![CDATA[xxxx yyyyyyyyyy]]></TITLE>
</entry>
<entry>
<TITLE><![CDATA[xxxx Gold… yyyyyyyyyy]]></TITLE>//this is line no 1008 that returns invalid character error and script stops
</entry>
</entries>
I think it might be due to ellipses because When I save the xml returned in local file in notepad++ and then feed that xml file the above parser runs good.
I want to run this xml directly from url instead of saving it into directory because that will be a overhead I don't need.Thanks

Answer 1

Make sure the web server you're pulling the file from is sending the correct character encoding when it serves the page. You should see something like this in the response headers:
Content-Type:"text/xml; charset=utf-8"
The headers can be viewed in the network panel of the inspector in any modern browser, when you request the XML file directly.
You should also specify the encoding in the file itself. The first line should look something like this:
<?xml encoding='UTF-8'?>
If these fail, you can always try using utf8_decode() which is an XML_Parser function that will attempt to convert the data to iso-8859-1.