DOM not parsing correctly - php

Question

I have a script which loads items from an XML file, and displays them, so a user can choose which item they want to remove from their file. Here's the PHP:
<?php
global $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo();
$userid= $current_user->ID;
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->load("playlists/$userid.xml");
echo '<div class="styled-select">';
echo '<center><form name="input" action="/remove/removesure.php" method="get">';
echo '<select name="q[]" size="2" multiple>';
$titles = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title');
foreach ($titles as $title) {
echo '<option>'.$title->nodeValue.'</option>';
}
echo '</select>';
echo '<input type="submit" class="submit" value="Remove">';
echo '</form></center>';
echo '</div>';
?>
The problem I've ran into is that it doesn't display some objects correctly, mainly items with hyphens (it displays – instead of -) and titles with spaces at the end, and because of this, my removal code doesn't find the item, and so can't remove it. I don't know what to do, and I don't know why it's doing this. I'm running the code in wordpress, if that makes a difference.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

If there is no chance of having any kind of councurrency, I would suggest you to use the title index of the title tag as value of "option". Eg:
$titles = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title');
$counter = 0;
foreach ($titles as $title) {
echo '<option value='.$counter.' >'.$title->nodeValue.'</option>';
$counter++;
}
In removesure.php, you could handle this by using an XPath expression like the next one:
//Title[2]
where "2" is the index of the title that must be removed.
That is a possible solution; another path you could try to follow is to handle spaces providing the best encoding option for your titles. htmlentity is the function that you should execute
echo '<option>'.htmlentity($title->nodeValue).'</option>'