How to avoid php breaking umlaut characters when loading a xml file? - php

Question

I've got an xml to parse with php, that contains some umlaut characters.
Every node that contains a string has the string wrapped in a cdata tag, but my problem starts before parsing the xml: when I load the file (I've also tried to print out the contents of the file with file_get_contests, same result), the umlaut characters get broken, so for example ü becomes ü. Running a htmlentities() is futile, as the characters are already broken at that point. The xml encode is utf-8, so I don't know what else to do to avoid this problem. Anyone can help me?
Edit:
xml sample 'locations.xml':
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<locations>
<location>
<id>481</id>
<city><![CDATA[Zürich]]></city>
</location>
</locations>
php code:
function parseLocations(){
$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->load('locations.xml');
$xml->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$data = array();
$locations = $xml->childNodes->item(0);
for($i=0; $i<$locations->childNodes->length; $i++){
$location = $locations->childNodes->item($i);
if($location->nodeName=="location"){
$tmp = parseVenue($location);
$data[] = $tmp;
}
}
echo var_export($data, true);
}
function parseVenue($location){
//I need to exclude some of the nodes
$exclude = array('#text');
$data = array();
for($i=0; $i<$location->childNodes->length; $i++){
$tag = $location->childNodes->item($i);
if(!in_array($tag->nodeName, $exclude)){
$data[$tag->nodeName] = $tag->nodeValue;
}
}
return $data;
}
echoed output:
array ( 0 => array ( 'id' => '481', 'city' => 'Zürich'), )