converting & to & for XML in PHP - php

Question

I am building a XML RSS for my page. And running into this error:
error on line 39 at column 46: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Apparently this is because I cant have & in XML... Which I do in my last field row...
What is the best way to clean all my $row['field']'s in PHP so that &'s turn into &

Answer 1

Use htmlspecialchars to encode just the HTML special characters &, <, >, " and optionally ' (see second parameter $quote_style).

Answer 2

It's called htmlentities() and html_entity_decode()

Answer 3

Really should look in the dom xml functions in php. Its a bit of work to figure out, but you avoid problems like this.

Answer 4

Convert Reserved XML characters to Entities
function xml_convert($str, $protect_all = FALSE)
{
$temp = '__TEMP_AMPERSANDS__';
// Replace entities to temporary markers so that
// ampersands won't get messed up
$str = preg_replace("/&#(\d+);/", "$temp\\1;", $str);
if ($protect_all === TRUE)
{
$str = preg_replace("/&(\w+);/", "$temp\\1;", $str);
}
$str = str_replace(array("&","<",">","\"", "'", "-"),
array("&", "<", ">", """, "&apos;", "-"),
$str);
// Decode the temp markers back to entities
$str = preg_replace("/$temp(\d+);/","&#\\1;",$str);
if ($protect_all === TRUE)
{
$str = preg_replace("/$temp(\w+);/","&\\1;", $str);
}
return $str;
}

Answer 5

Use
html_entity_decode($row['field']);
This will take and revert back to the & from & also if you have &npsb; it will change that to a space.
http://us.php.net/html_entity_decode
Cheers