Re: Strange 'В' character output when using simplexml load string

Greetings, bizt.
In reply to Your message dated Monday, April 7, 2008, 17:19:28,

I converting an XML string using simplexml_load_string function. It is
giving me a В character for some reason dotted around the text.

 simplexml always outputs in UTF-8. Is your page's encoding UTF-8?

At a guess, ISO-8859-1 or perhaps ISO-8859-15.

In UTF-8, a "prefix" of an 0xC2 byte is used to access the top half of the
"Latin-1 Supplement" block which includes a lot of juicy characters such
as currency symbols, fractions, superscript 2 and 3, the copyright and
registered trademark symbols, and the non-breaking space.

However in ISO-8859-1 and -15, the byte 0xC2 represents an В, so if UTF-8
is misinterpreted as one of those, then you get В followed by some other
nonsense character.

Probably the easiest solution would be to take the output from SimpleXML
and pass it through iconv():

        $xmlout = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-15//TRANSLIT', $xmlout);

Note that UTF-8 is capable of representing a far greater range of
characters than ISO-8859-1/-15 are, so certain characters may not properly
survive conversion. (Using the '//TRANSLIT' option tells iconv to do its
best, and if, say, a particular accented character is not available in
ISO-8859-1, then to substitute an unaccented one in its place.)

Hi, ive tried what you said which worked for one of my pages but when
i tried it on another i got the following:

Notice: iconv() [function.iconv]: Detected an illegal character in
input string in /home/public_html/search_apartments.php on line 67

Im using the following to convert my XML string which is fetched via
cUrl:

$result = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-15//TRANSLIT', $result);

Would it be the case that my $result string, im not providing the
iconv() with the correct input encoding? If so, is there a way for me
to detect the input encoding?

As a guess, Your "B" probably followed by space and represent a non-breaking
space.

To Your trouble with iconv on $result, I think You should take care of the
SOURCE BEFORE using simplexml_load_string.
And see what the encoding it use. Because if Your source in, say, ISO-8859-15,
You can't have any untranslatable characters in UTF-8 what You can't convert
back to ISO-8859-15.


--
Sincerely Yours, AnrDaemon <anrdaemon@xxxxxxxxxxx>

.

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