Understanding and printing/encoding special characters

[adrianTNT]

Hello.

 

I have some issues understanding special characters and how they should be printed on screen.

For example... php takes from database an image title and it is: "Brasão" with that special "a".

In the web page it is printed correctly but inside an rss (feed file that I made) it says:

 

The XML page cannot be displayed

Reference to undefined entity 'Atilde'. Error processing resource 'http://www.jpgbox.com/feed.xml'. Line 76, Position 16

<title>Brasão Rio Grande do Sul</title>

---------------^

 

Is there a function that I can use to convert the string to be safely printed in the RSS file?

In my rss header I have application/rss+xml charset:utf-8.

I hope I explained correctly.

 

Thank you.

- Adrian.

 

[effigy]

The data should be encoded in UTF-8 or the entities converted to their numerical equivalents, e.g., & # x e 3 ;. What character set is the database using?

[adrianTNT]

Hello, the tables show latin1_swedish_ci as "collation" and the same in an upper level; I don't know if is correct or not. (These should be the default values that php my admin shown me when setting the database).

 

I later saw that I had an html_entities() done on the image_title and that was what caused the error I mentioned above in first post. I removed the html_entities() and did this:

 

$image_title = strip_tags($image_title);
$image_title = str_replace("\r\n"," ",$image_title);
$image_title = utf8_encode($image_title);

 

But when it reaches an '&' it says:

Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource 'feed.xml'. Line 1353, Positio...
<description>Mother & daughter Golden Retriver's Molly & Elsie 

 

Do you know what I should do about this?

Should I just str_replace the '&' with something like 'and' or there is a more professional fix to avoid this?

 

Thanks.

[effigy]

How are you creating this file? Which XML functions?

[adrianTNT]

I guess it's "manually" without XML functions ...

I have:

<?php header("content-type: application/rss+xml charset:utf-8",true);?>
<?php echo html_entity_decode('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>');?> 
...
<?php echo "<title>".$listing_title."</title>\n";?>
...

[effigy]

I would imagine something like XMLWriter would handle the data properly. A user note states that the input must be UTF-8, though. See if MySQL will convert it for you via this method.

[adrianTNT]

I think with XMLWriter I would have to code the whole page differently.

I tried some more things and it appears to work ok like this:

 

$listing_title = $row_Recordset_listings_rss['listing_title'];

$listing_title = strip_tags($listing_title);

$listing_title = str_replace("\r\n"," ",$listing_title);

$listing_title = htmlspecialchars($listing_title);

$listing_title = utf8_encode($listing_title);

 

Using htmlspecialchars to get rid of the errors generated by characters like "&".

So apparently it works ok now.

Thank you for your time.

 

- Adrian.