php output xml produces parse error “’”

Question

Is there any function that I can use to parse any string to ensure it won\'t cause xml parsing problems? I have a php script outputting a xml file with content obtained from

Answer 1

I had a similar problem that the data i needed to add to the XML was already being returned by my code as htmlentities() (not in the database like this).

i used:

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0','utf-8');    
$element = $doc->createElement("content");    
$element->appendChild($doc->createElement('string', htmlspecialchars(html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8')));
$doc->appendChild($element);

or if it was not already in htmlentities() just the below should work

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0','utf-8');

$element = $doc->createElement("content");       
$element->appendChild($doc->createElement('string', htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8')));
$doc->appendChild($element);

basically using htmlspecialchars with ENT_XML1 should get user imputed data into XML safe data (and works fine for me):

htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8');