How to pass special characters to xml file - php

Question

I am editing a xml file a particular node file after tha I am saving tha but it contains some special character because of line number 7 of my code
$xml = simplexml_load_file('demo.xml');
$i=2;
foreach($xml->Page as $myPage){
if($myPage['id']==$i) {
$da = "data";
$text = "helloworld";
$myPage->$da ="<![CDATA[{$text}]]>"; //line number
$xml->asXML('demo.xml');
}
how can I put the string as it is in xml file?

Answer 1

SimpleXML does not handle CDATA very well. If you want to write CDATA you need to use the DOM objects. For example:
$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->load('demo.xml');
$i = 2;
foreach ($xml->getElementsByTagName('Page') as $page) {
if ($page->attributes->getNamedItem('id')->value == $i) {
$da = 'data';
$text = 'helloworld';
$data = $xml->createElement($da);
$data->appendChild($xml->createCDATASection($text));
$page->appendChild($data);
}
}
If you want to continue to use SimpleXML, you can load just the element you want to write the CDATA into as a DOM object.
$xml = simplexml_load_file('demo.xml');
$i = 2;
foreach ($xml->Page as $page) {
if ($page['id'] == $i) {
$da = 'data';
$text = 'helloworld';
$page->$da = '';
$node = dom_import_simplexml($page->$da);
$dom = $node->ownerDocument;
$node->appendChild($dom->createCDATASection($text));
}
}
$xml->asXML('demo.xml');