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» Saving user content to XML aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8 | Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed | ChrisMcKee.co.uk

Saving user content to XML aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8
July 23, 2009

Error Contains None UTF-8 Content… Bleh

When encoding use content to XML there are often issues that occur… 99.9% of the time stemming from users copy-pasting from MSWord in to text boxes and all the odd characters being carried through. PHP will play dumb and happily save this, then winge like a b’tch about displaying it.

A few quickfixes on saving the content are as follows…

Us your constructing your document as follows (simple example)

	$doc = new DOMDocument();
	$root = $doc->createElement('articles');
	$root = $doc->appendChild($root);
       //...
       /* When you get to your body text (i.e the user entered bit) */
      	//BODY
	$body = $doc->createElement('mybodytext');
	$root->appendChild($body);
 
	$bodytext  = $_POST['bodytext']; //Take the post Data
	$bodytext = iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE",$bodytext); /* This will Convert the string to the requested character encoding and strip all of the none-utf-8 characters (http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php */
 
	$bodytext = htmlentities($bodytext,ENT_COMPAT); /* Standard Convert HTML entities */
	$cdata = $doc->createCDATASection($bodytext); /* Stick it in a CDATA (as their could be all sorts of stuff in there*/
	$body->appendChild($cdata);
 
      //... Rest of your Content + Save

As well as this there is also

mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');

Which offers similar functionality (http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-convert-encoding.php) as the above will allow you to convert string from ISO to UTF8.

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One Response to “ Saving user content to XML aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8 ”

Jonathan , on April 21st, 2010 at 4:57 pm Said:

Thanks you are amazing, this line: mb_convert_encoding($str, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');
save me a lot of work and headaches.
This is a excelent post, thanks again.