PHP DOMDocument loadHTML not encoding UTF-8 correctly

Question

I\'m trying to parse some HTML using DOMDocument, but when I do, I suddenly lose my encoding (at least that is how it appears to me).

$profile = \"

        

Answer 1

DOMDocument::loadHTML will treat your string as being in ISO-8859-1 unless you tell it otherwise. This results in UTF-8 strings being interpreted incorrectly.

If your string doesn't contain an XML encoding declaration, you can prepend one to cause the string to be treated as UTF-8:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>' . $profile);
echo $dom->saveHTML();

If you cannot know if the string will contain such a declaration already, there's a workaround in SmartDOMDocument which should help you:

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($profile, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));
echo $dom->saveHTML();

This is not a great workaround, but since not all characters can be represented in ISO-8859-1 (like these katana), it's the safest alternative.

Answer 2

The only thing that worked for me was the accepted answer of

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>' . $profile);
echo $dom->saveHTML();

HOWEVER

This brought about new issues, of having <?xml encoding="utf-8" ?> in the output of the document.

The solution for me was then to do

foreach ($doc->childNodes as $xx) {
    if ($xx instanceof \DOMProcessingInstruction) {
        $xx->parentNode->removeChild($xx);
    }
}

Some solutions told me that to remove the xml header, that I had to perform

$dom->saveXML($dom->documentElement);

This didn't work for me as for a partial document (e.g. a doc with two <p> tags), only one of the <p> tags where being returned.

Answer 3

I am using php 7.3.8 on a manjaro and I was working with Persian content. This solved my problem:

$html = 'hi</b><p>سلام<div>の家庭に、9 ☆';
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$doc->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));
print $doc->saveHTML($doc->documentElement) . PHP_EOL . PHP_EOL;

Answer 4

You could prefix a line enforcing utf-8 encoding, like this:

@$doc->loadHTML('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "\n" . $profile);

And you can then continue with the code you already have, like:

$doc->saveXML()

Answer 5

Can also encode like below.... gathered from https://davidwalsh.name/domdocument-utf8-problem

$profile = '<p>イリノイ州シカゴにて、アイルランド系の家庭に、9</p>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($profile, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));
echo $dom->saveHTML();

Answer 6

Works finde for me:

$dom = new \DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML(utf8_decode($html));
...
return  utf8_encode( $dom->saveHTML());