Working with HTML econding in PHP (intelligent way to decode) - php

Question

from a PHP script I'm downloading a RSS feed like:
$fp = fopen('http://news.google.es/news?cf=all&ned=es_ve&hl=es&output=rss','r')
or die('Error reading RSS data.');
The feed is an spanish news feed, after I downloaded the file I parsed all the info into one var that have only the content of the tag <description> of every <item>. Well, the issue is that when I echo the var all the information have an html enconding like:
echo($result); // this print: el ministerio pãºblico investigarã¡ la publicaciã³n en la primera pã¡gina
Well I can create a HUGE case instance that searchs for every char can change it for the correspongind one, like: ã¡ for Á and so and so, but there is no way to do this with a single function??? or even better, there is no way to download the content to $fp without the html encoding? Thanks!
Actual code:
<?php
$acumula="";
$insideitem = false;
$tag = '';
$title = '';
$description = '';
$link = '';
function startElement($parser, $name, $attrs) {
global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link;
if ($insideitem) {
$tag = $name;
} elseif ($name == 'ITEM') {
$insideitem = true;
}
}
function endElement($parser, $name) {
global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link, $acumula;
if ($name == 'ITEM') {
$acumula = $acumula . (trim($title)) . "<br>" . (trim($description));
$title = '';
$description = '';
$link = '';
$insideitem = false;
}
}
function characterData($parser, $data) {
global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link;
if ($insideitem) {
switch ($tag) {
case 'TITLE':
$title .= $data;
break;
case 'DESCRIPTION':
$description .= $data;
break;
case 'LINK':
$link .= $data;
break;
}
}
}
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, 'startElement', 'endElement');
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
$fp = fopen('http://news.google.es/news?cf=all&ned=es_ve&hl=es&output=rss','r')
or die('Error reading RSS data.');
while ($data = fread($fp, 4096)) {
xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp))
or die(sprintf('XML error: %s at line %d',
xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
}
//echo $acumula;
fclose($fp);
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
echo($acumula); // THIS IS $RESULT!
?>

Answer 1

EDIT
Since you're already using the XML parser, you're guaranteed the encoding is UTF-8.
If your page is encoded in ISO-8859-1, or even ASCII, you can do this to convert:
$result = mb_convert_encoding($result, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8");
Use a library that handles this for you, e.g. the DOM extension or SimpleXML. Example:
$d = new DOMDocument();
$d->load('http://news.google.es/news?cf=all&ned=es_ve&hl=es&output=rss');
//now all the data you get will be encoded in UTF-8
Example with SimpleXML:
$url = 'http://news.google.es/news?cf=all&ned=es_ve&hl=es&output=rss';
if ($sxml = simplexml_load_file($url)) {
echo htmlspecialchars($sxml->channel->title); //UTF-8
}

Answer 2

You can use DOMDocument from PHP to strip HTML encoding tags.
And use encoding conversion functions also from PHP to change encoding of this sting.