Flex: Send XML content with HTML entities to PHP via POST - php

Question

I developed a desktop AIR application which saves data locally as XML files.
When the user clicks a button, the xml content is posted to a PHP application, where data is handled (inserted or updated).
The problem is, when I post some data containing html entities like & or >, the xml content is not parsed.
I'm using this class to parse the xml content:
https://sites.google.com/site/floweringmind/home
This is the input:
<companie_ps>
<denCompanie>Company & Friends</denCompanie>
<email>abc#abc.ro</email>
</companie_ps>
This is the wanted result:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[denCompanie] => Company & Friends
[email] => abc#abc.ro
)
)
This is the actual result:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[denCompanie] => Array
(
[#content] => Company
)
)
)
Error message: XML parse error 68 'XML_ERR_NAME_REQUIRED' at line 5, column 28 (byte index 63).
EDIT: The problem came from the fact that the post was converting html entities inside xml tags contents to actual characters. So, I used a regex to replace the special characters with their html entities. This is the code, in case someone will need it:
function _handle_match($match)
{
return '<' . $match[1] . '>' . htmlentities($match[2]) . '</' . $match[3] . '>';
}
$pattern = "/\<(.*)\>(.*?)\<\/(.*)\>/imU";
$xml = preg_replace_callback($pattern, '_handle_match', $xml);