How to handle curly apostrphes and curly quotes in PHP when generating xml?

Question

My DB has some text which is probably copied and pasted from word document contains some curly quotes and curly apostrophes. PHP code is generating XML data/document with this text as one of its XML element.

This is the error I'm getting when I try to display the XMl doc

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 40 at column 1: Encoding error

Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

I've tried as mentioned in the post here, but it isn't working for me. Also tried

$output = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $input);

as mentioned here. This one displays the text till curly quotes or apostrophe appears. Do I need to mention any different character output format here?

Is there any function available in PHP to handle these type of special characters when generating XML document. I am using <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> character encoding for XML documnet

Here is some of my code

header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>';

$item = mysql_fetch_object($result);
<listitems>
    <item>
        <name><?=htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($item->name))?></name>
        <details><?=htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($item->details))?></details>
        .
        .
        .
        .

    </item>
</listitems>

Needs more info. What character set is the data in when you fetch it? Can you show some of the PHP code you are using to generate the document? — Pekka, Jan 09 '12 at 07:35

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 03 '17 at 07:54

3

on the table it says DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

It could be that you are fetching ISO-8859-1 data and outputting it as UTF-8. That would result in invalid characters beyond the 128 basic ASCII characters.

Try this iconv():

$output = iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $input);

edited May 03 '17 at 07:54

Improv

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answered Jan 09 '12 at 08:38

Pekka

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Thanks Pekka, it works:) just want to know, can we write like this iconv('latin1', 'UTF-8', $appObj->description); as in the table it is mentioned as latin1. just want to know better about it – S K Jan 09 '12 at 09:06
1

“Latin1” could also refer to Windows Latin 1, windows-1252. In fact, ISO-8859-1 does not contain curly apostrophes or curly quotes, though it is not uncommon that programs effectively treat ISO-8859-1 as windows-1252. – Jukka K. Korpela Jan 09 '12 at 11:06
@Jukka ah, that detail escaped me - good to know, thanks! [mySQL's latin1 seems equivalent to Windows-1252 rather than ISO-8559-1](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-we-sets.html). But this @S K, would mean that you might need to use `windows-1252` as the first parameter to iconv if the curly quotes don't work out. – Pekka Jan 09 '12 at 11:25

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 09 '12 at 07:38

0

Try to wrap the text-nodes that contain the curly apostrophes in CDATA blocks like this:

<text><![CDATA[This is my test´s text]]></text>

That way you prevent xml viewers from parsing that text and it gets rendered correctly.

answered Jan 09 '12 at 07:38

bardiir

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It displays data but ended up showing only some of the data. Just stopped in the middle. – S K Jan 09 '12 at 08:07

How to handle curly apostrphes and curly quotes in PHP when generating xml?

2 Answers2