I have written an XML file which is using the ISO-8859-15 encoding and most of the data within the feed is ran through htmlspecialchars().
I am then using simplyxml_load_string() to retrieve the contents of the XML file to use in my script. However, if I have any special characters (ie: é á ó) it comes out as "é á ó". The
How can I get my script to display the proper special accented characters?
You’re probably using a different character encoding for you output than the XML data is actually encoded.
According to your description, your XML data encoded with UTF-8 but your output is using ISO 8859-15. Because UTF-8 encodes the character é (U+00E9) with 0xC3A9 and that represents the two characters à and © respectively in ISO 8859-15.
So you either use UTF-8 for your output as well. Or you convert the data from UTF-8 to ISO 8859-15 using mb_convert_encoding.
Related
The problem is age old: php + mysql + utf-8 encoding
We have a two component model: a backend service, that provides access to some json data via web-access and some client, that displays the data. the backend reads data from a mysql source, which is of collation type 'utf8 - default collation', the php script is utf-8 encoded.
The problem is that the rendered json data contains escaped unicode characters
like 'Rungestra\u00dfe 20'. what could be done to see the 'real' entity like 'ß' in this case?
The problem is that the rendered json data contains escaped unicode characters like 'Rungestra\u00dfe 20'
Why is that a problem? \u00DF is perfectly valid JSON syntax for the letter ß. Any JSON decoder will parse that string literal escape into the single character U+00DF Latin Small Letter Sharp S. For example if your client is a web browser then JSON.parse().
ß can be included in an HTML document as-is, you do not have to escape it to ß or ß.
Found this by google should help here.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/2577882/2422553
Try mb_convert_encoding() with the "to" encoding as 'HTML-ENTITIES', and (if necessary) the "from" encoding set to 'UTF-8' or whichever Unicode encoding you're using.
I got a system which previously the html encoding type was set as ISO-8859-1 and it caused all the Chinese characters store in the format of "&\#36830;&\#34915;&\#35033;".
So my question is, how can I convert the format above into Chinese word back in UTF-8?
For your information, I had tried with utf8_decode, iconv, but none of them work. :(
Thank you very much.
The current text encoding of that string is rather insubstantial. What you have there are HTML entities; they have little to do with the underlying "physical" encoding like ISO-8859 or UTF-8. What you want is to decode those HTML entities into a byte representation of the characters in a specific encoding, in this case to UTF-8. Therefore:
echo html_entity_decode('连衣裙', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
// 连衣裙
You need to use:
utf8_encode($data);
and not decode,to convert your current ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
Some native PHP functions such as strtolower(), strtoupper() and ucfirst() do not always function correctly with UTF-8 strings. Possible solutions: convert to latin first or add the following line to your code:
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'C');
Make sure not to save your PHP files using a BOM (Byte-Order Marker) UTF-8 file marker (your browser might show these BOM characters between PHP pages on your site).
Just for your reference:
ISO-8859-1 => Albanian, Brazilian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish
UTF-8 => Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, Persian
There are many tools that can convert character references to characters, and writing such a tool is rather straightforward, especially if you know the references are all decimal. So the answer really depends on the software environment.
For example, to do such a conversion for an individual HTML document, you could use the BabelPad editor: command Convert → Numeric Character References (NCR) → NCR to Unicode, and save the result as UTF-8.
I am having difficulty with non-standard characters using simplexml_load_string.
I have loaded an newspaper xml feed using file_get_contents. If I print to screen the contents I get a title for one of the articles as :
<title>‘If Legault were running in Alberta, he’d be more popular’: How right-wing is the CAQ?</title>
If I then do this:
$feed = #simplexml_load_string($xml);
And print the results of $feed, the title has changed to:
[title] => �If Legault were running in Alberta, he�d be more popular�: How right-wing is the CAQ?
Any advice on how to stop these characters being displayed like this?
This looks SimpleXML is creating a UTF-8 string, which is then rendered in ISO-8859-1 (latin-1) or something close like CP-1252.
When you save the result to a file and serve that file via a web server, the browser will use the encoding declared in the file.
Including in a web page
Since your web page encoding is not UTF-8, you need to convert the string to whatever encoding you are using, eg ISO-8859-1 (latin-1).
This is easily done with iconv():
$xmlout = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $xmlout);
Saving to database
You database column is not using UTF-8 collation, so you should use iconv to convert the string to the charset that your database uses.
Assuming your database collation is the same as the encoding that you render in, you will not have to do anything when reading from the database.
Explanation
In UTF-8, a 0xc2 prefix byte is used to access the top half of the "Latin-1 Supplement" block which includes characters such as accented letters, currency symbols, fractions, superscript 2 and 3, the copyright and registered trademark symbols, and the non-breaking space.
However in ISO-8859-1, the byte 0xC2 represents an Â. So when your UTF-8 string is misinterpreted as one of those, then you get  followed by some other nonsense character.
This is a charset issue. it needs to be utf8, you can run utf8_decode on the content, but its better to fix this issue by matching charsets from your input (feed) to your output (html page i presume).
I'm parsing an RSS feed that has an ’ in it. SimpleXML turns this into a ’. What can I do to stop this?
Just to answer some of the questions that have come up - I'm pulling an RSS feed using CURL. If I output this directly to the browser, the ’ displays as ’ which is what's expected. When I create a new SimpleXMLElement using this, (e.g. $xml = new SimpleXmlElement($raw_feed); and dump the $xml variable, every instance of ’ is replaced with ’.
It appears that SimpleXML is having trouble with UTF-8 ampersand encoded characters. (The XML declaration specifies UTF-8.)
I do have control over the feed after CURL has retrieved the feed before it's used to construct a SimpleXML element.
’ represents the Unicode character ’ (U+2019) that is encoded with 0xE28099 in UTF-8. And when that byte sequence is interpreted with Windows-1252, it represents the characters â (0xE2), € (0x80), and ™ (0x99).
That means SimpleXML handles the input as UTF-8 encoded but you interpret its output as Windows-1252. And unless you really want to use Windows-1252, you are probably just missing to specify the character encoding of your output properly.
It came down to having to set the default encoding to UTF-8 in four places:
The default locale at the head of the file: setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
Encoding the string that comes out of CURL: utf8_encode($string);
Setting the MySQL connection to use UTF-8 by default: mysqli_set_charset($database_insert_connection, 'utf8');
Setting the appropriate collation in the MySQL database to utf8_general_ci
If outputting to the browser, setting the appropriate header (e.g. header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');)
Hope this helps someone in the future!
I'm starting out with some XML that looks like this (simplified):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<alldata>
<data name="Forsetì" />
</alldata>
</xml>
But after I've parsed it with simplexml_load_string the special character (the i) becomes: ì which is obviously pretty mangled.
Is there a way to prevent this from happening?
I know for a fact the XML is fine, when saved as .txt and viewed in the browser the characters are fine. When I use simplexml_load_string on the XML and then save values as a text file, or to the database, its mangled.
This looks SimpleXML is creating a UTF-8 string, which is then rendered in ISO-8859-1 (latin-1) or something close like CP-1252.
When you save the result to a file and serve that file via a web server, the browser will use the encoding declared in the file.
Including in a web page
Since your web page encoding is not UTF-8, you need to convert the string to whatever encoding you are using, eg ISO-8859-1 (latin-1).
This is easily done with iconv():
$xmlout = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT', $xmlout);
Saving to database
You database column is not using UTF-8 collation, so you should use iconv to convert the string to the charset that your database uses.
Assuming your database collation is the same as the encoding that you render in, you will not have to do anything when reading from the database.
Explanation
In UTF-8, a 0xc2 prefix byte is used to access the top half of the "Latin-1 Supplement" block which includes characters such as accented letters, currency symbols, fractions, superscript 2 and 3, the copyright and registered trademark symbols, and the non-breaking space.
However in ISO-8859-1, the byte 0xC2 represents an Â. So when your UTF-8 string is misinterpreted as one of those, then you get  followed by some other nonsense character.
It's very likely that the XML is fine, but the character gets mangled when stored or output.
If you're outputting data on a HTML page: Make sure it's encoded in UTF-8 as well. If your HTML page is in ISO-8859-1, you can use utf8_decode as a quick fix; using UTF-8 is the better option in the long run.
If you're storing the data in a mySQL, you need to have UTF8 selected as the encoding all the way through: As the connection's encoding, in the table, and in the column(s) you insert the data into.
I've also had some problems with this, and it came from the PHP script encoding. Make sure it's set to UTF-8.
If it's still not good, try printing the variable using uft8_encode or utf8_decode.
XML is strict when it comes to entities, like & should be & and ì should ì
So you will need a translation table.
function xml_entity_decode($_string) {
// Set up XML translation table
$_xml=array();
$_xl8=get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES,ENT_COMPAT);
while (list($_key,)=each($_xl8))
$_xml['&#'.ord($_key).';']=$_key;
return strtr($_string,$_xml);
}
Late to the party... But I've faced this and solved like below.
You have declared encoding in XML so if you load xml file using DOMDocument it won't cause any issue.
But in case it happens in other use case, you can use html_entity_decode like below:
html_entity_decode($xml->saveXML());