Posted by Jasper Bryant-Greene on 10/15/07 11:29

jonathan wrote:
> So I'm reading up on character encoding in XML documents as I think
> this is the problem (after the many helpful suggestions on this list).
>
> With regards to your second question; no, I'm not sure if I'm using
> proper utf-8 througout the entire process. When I input from the form
> I'm converting everything via htmlentities . This is why I'm getting
> è etc... (On a side note, is there a function or way to check to
> see if a form is using the native characters (from a copy and paste of
> a word document like è) or the HTML entity è .

If you're using the correct character set all the way through, you only
need to do htmlspecialchars() to convert things like & and <, as
all the other characters should already be present in the character set
you are using (UTF-8). htmlentities() is mostly used for converting
characters outside of your character set into entities.

> I've changed the content-type from text/xml to application/xml but that
> doesn't seem to help.
>
> As only UTF-8 and UTF-16 have to be supported, I'm concerned whether
> the processor might think it is some other encoding.
>
> The HTTP headers are:
>
> Date => Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:49:02 GMT
> Server => Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.8 PHP/5.0.4
> mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4
> FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
> X-Powered-By => PHP/5.0.4
> Cache-Control => no-cache
> Connection => close
> Content-Type => application/xml

header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8');

> I guess pursuant to cc's suggestion, I should do an html_entity_decode
> when I make the xml document and then do another htmlentities on the
> html representatoin.

Shouldn't be any need. Characters like è don't have any special meaning
in XML, and they can be represented in the UTF-8 character set, so
there's no need to convert them to entities at any stage.

--
Jasper Bryant-Greene
General Manager
Album Limited

a: Freepost Album, PO Box 579, Christchurch 8015, New Zealand
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e: jasper@album.co.nz
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Memberships:
* Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
* Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

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