XML-Output of the character ellipsis from filename - php

Question

I like to print out the special character ellipsis "…" in XML. If it is hardcoded it works. But if I get that character from readdir(). It won't work. Why?
Code:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8');
$maxnesting = 2;
echo "<root>";
initXMLDir("//somefolder");
function initXMLDir($target, $level = 0){
global $maxnesting;
$ignore = array("cgi-bin", ".", "..");
if(is_dir($target) && $level < $maxnesting){
if($dir = opendir($target)){
while (($file = readdir($dir)) !== false){
if(!in_array($file, $ignore)){
if(is_dir("$target/$file")){
echo "<object><name>".$file."</name>";
initXMLDir("$target/$file", ($level+1));
echo "</object>";
}
else{
echo "<object>".$file."</object>";
}
}
}
}
closedir($dir);
}
}
echo "</root>";
?>
If I hardcode it like this and remove the character for example from the filename, it works.
echo "<object>…".$file."…</object>";
The error it prints out is.
An invalid character was found in text content.
Edit-Workaround:
So my solution or workaround for this problem. By combining this function I found here
function xml_character_encode($string, $trans='') {
$trans=(is_array($trans)) ? $trans : get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES);
foreach ($trans as $k=>$v) $trans[$k]= "&#".ord($k).";";
return strtr($string, $trans);
}
and with
iconv(mb_detect_encoding($file, "auto"), 'UTF-8', $file);
I solved my problem. So basically I'm encoding all characters first which causes problem with iconv() so I can safely use that later.
So use it like this:
$file= xml_character_encode($file);
$file= iconv(mb_detect_encoding($file, "auto"), 'UTF-8', $file);
I tried to manually replace the character ellipsis because it seems it's the only special character that won't display properly with utf8_encode() and htmlspecialchars() (which are the only 2 functions I would need if ellipsis would display properly) but can't be done somehow with strtr().