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• HTML encoding issues - “” character showing up instead of “ ” 7 answers

I'm using simplexml_load_string to load an XML document into an object. This seemed to be working great up until I came across this element:

<some_string_val>1.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Some text.</some_string_val>

After running that ran through simplexml_load_string, what came out was:

["some_string_val"]=> string(20) "1.     Some text"

I tried using:

html_entity_decode($string,  ENT_QUOTES, "Windows-1252");

And that seemed to convert the  's to plain text, but when I tried to run that through simplexml_load_string I get the same result. I also tried with UTF-8, and a few others, with similar or worse results.

So, what can I do to convert the  's to UTF-8 so it can be parsed correctly by simplexml_load_string? Keeping the HTML entities intact is not a concern because this is going into a CSV.

EDIT: This has been unjustly marked as a duplicate for a couple of reasons:

1. This is not language agnostic; this is dealing with a specific set of PHP functions, unlike the post which this was marked a duplicate of
2. This is not going to an HTML page or a PDF, it is going to a CSV, so I cannot set a header. The accepted solution will not work in my case

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Answer 1

I think it parses correctly. It just the way that function works, replacing those codes with special characters.

You can fix the result string, converting it into cp1251

$str = iconv('utf-8', 'cp1251', $str);

Also I would delete double spaces before writing it into CSV file

$str = str_replace(chr(160), ' ', $str);
$str= trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $str));