在PHP中将XML从UTF-8解码为ISO-8859-1

Question

I'm trying to "decode" an XML file (and transforming it with XSLT), but I'm having trouble decoding both files. The scenario is as follows:

I have a site for data entry which is all encoded in ISO-8859-1 (our Oracle database is in that format, so I can't change it). The problem is, I have those 2 files (an XML to show the data entry form and and XSLT to transform it into HTML). Both files are saved in ISO-8859-1 encoding, and both have the corresponding header, i. e., , and whenever I read the files and show them in the browser, the special characters (ñ, á, ¿) are shown either as UTF-8 or as a question mark (depending on the method I use for showing), but never as the "normal" representation.

My code for showing the XML file is:

<?php
$xslString = file_get_contents("catalog.xsl");
$xslString = utf8_decode($xslString);
$xslDoc = simplexml_load_string($xslString);

$xmlString = file_get_contents("questionnaire.xml");
$xmlString = utf8_decode($xmlString);
$xmlDoc = simplexml_load_string($xmlString);

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->importStylesheet($xslDoc);
?>

I already tried several combinations of DOMDocument, iconv, mb_convert_encoding, but they show the XML file as unencoded UTF, a question mark or a double question mark.

On the other hand, this also messes up my data entry, since if I want to enter one of those characters, they either show as ? or ?? on the corresponding data field on the DB, or they get truncated at the first special char (if I use iconv).

What am I missing? Is there a workaround? I can't convert anything to UTF-8 because of the database.

I hope I'm being clear enough, please excuse my English.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hope this helps others. In the end, there were two things:

1) I was reading the XML/XSL files like this (in my original script):

<?php
$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmlDoc->loadXML($xmlFile);
$xmlDoc->load("xmlfile.xml");
?>

which effectively changed the encoding to UTF-8. I changed the lines to:

<?php
$xmlString = file_get_contents("xmlfile.xml");
$xmlDoc = simplexml_load_string($xmlString);
?>

removing the utf_decode statement, and it worked like a charm. Now I get my special chars on screen as they're intended. As a side effect, the data entered in the form is now saved correctly to my database, so I got two birds in one shot.