Get entity numbers (not names) for unique characters like ö? - for XML document

[ultrus]

Hello,

I created an XML file to import into an InDesign XML workflow. InDesign is tripping on it though as it doesn't like importing characters like 'ö', nor does it like to import the xml entity name of 'ö'. It does however enjoy importing the entity number of 'ö'.

 

How do I clean up a string to make this work using PHP? Here's what I have so far that doesn't seem to be doing anything yet that I can see (maybe my browser is converting it before I see the results?):

 

<?php
$foreignString = 'Dr. Wörner';
//This is what I want: Dr. W [&]#246;rner - take out brackets, forums are doing something odd with &#246;rner
//This is what I DON'T want: Dr. Wörner
//This is what I DON'T want: Dr. Wörner

//referenced from http://www.lazycat.org/php-convert-entities.php
$cleanString = htmlspecialchars(
  html_entity_decode($foreignString, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), 
  ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'
);

print $cleanString;
?>

 

Am I on the right track? Any thoughts on how to finalize?

 

Best regards,

 

Chris

[ultrus]

No dice? I'm starting to rev up the Google engine on this one again today. I'll post if I find something, but feedback is welcome if you have thoughts.

 

Plan B:

I could make my own string replace function based on this table:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

[litebearer]

perhaps this may guide you ...

http://php.net/manual/en/function.ord.php

[ultrus]

Yeah I was mulling around there for a while. What I ended up doing that worked this morning is something like this:

	function replaceEntities($string) {
	$string = htmlentities($string);
	$string = str_replace(
		array(
			""",
			"'",
			"..."),
		array(
			"[&]#34;",
			"[&]#39;",
			"..."), //minus the brackets
		$string);
	return $string;
}

 

Worked great for what I needed. Thanks for the reply.