Question about SimpleXML

[Jojorax]

Using the SimpleXML functions with PHP5 RC1, I've found a strange (for me) behaviour; I'm not sure what's the origin, if it's PHP's fault or if it's intrinsic to XML(??).
The problem is following: if the xml file contains characters like àèìòù (typical in languages like italian), the simplexml_load_file functions fails and returns NULL.
An emergency-solution to avoid this is to manually replace the characters:

$file = file( $path );
$str = implode( '', $file );
$str = str_replace( 'à', 'a', $str );
$xml = simplexml_load_string( $str );

but it's absolutely ugly, and by this way I can't restore the characters after the file is loaded.

Anyone has solutions/suggestions? I really need them (and probably, with me, all the italian developers)

Thanks

[firepages]

I think its XML itself , perhaps more informed answer to be found in the XML forum , for ALL XML (PHP parsed or otherwise) I use the appropriate entity though I assume there must be another way around this

e.g à = à

<edit>moving to XML for a better answer</edit>

[bcarl314]

Perhaps changin the character set to UTF-8 will solve the problem???

[Jojorax]

UTF-8 encoding don't seems to change things.
Using explicit representation à results in no opening failure even if a wrong character is used. Maybe an appropriate character encodin can help, but my problem is that i have no control on what is inside the file: I must import a quite big (>400K) externally provided xml file into my db.
Is there a way to say "take whatever in this tag as is!"?

[Alex Vincent]

Hm, I'm not familiar with PHP's handling of XML (thanks, firepages :rolleyes: ), but I'm inclined to ask for your XML source code which demonstrates the problem. Honestly, there may not be an easy solution to this. I've never heard of SimpleXML.

[firepages]

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<suspect>
<no_problemo>El ActÓr</no_problemo>
<problemo>El ActÓr</problemo>
</suspect>


Ignoring PHP for a second , the above causes an error in IE & whilst moz shows the tree but the <problemo /> is printed as '?' , the entity itself works fine.

So how would this normally be handled ? entites or doctype or ?

.....................................................

Alex , take a looksee at http://www.php.net/simplexml , you will like , PHP dudes will like for sure as it takes any valid XML and turns it into a PHP object with access to the DOM and xpath queries.

Its a league ahead of the existing PHP XML parser functions , you need PHP5 to play with it though.

It finally makes the use of say XML config/data files etc realistic in PHP as simpleXML carries far less overhead (and typing ;) ) than the existing XML parser methodolgy in PHP ... I shall still use serialized objects for pure PHP stuff , but anything that has to be human readable .... ~