[php] Error: "Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !" using PHP's simplexml_load_string

I'm getting the error:

parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xED 0x6E 0x2C 0x20

When trying to process an XML response using simplexml_load_string from a 3rd party source. The raw XML response does declare the content type:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Yet it seems that the XML is not really UTF-8. The langauge of the XML content is Spanish and contain words like Dublín in the XML.

I'm unable to get the 3rd party to sort out their XML.

How can I pre-process the XML and fix the encoding incompatibilities?

Is there a way to detect the correct encoding for a XML file?

Instead of using javascript, you can simply put this line of code after your mysql_connect sentence:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$connection);

Cheers.

When generating mapping files using doctrine I ran into same issue. I fixed it by removing all comments that some fields had in the database.

If you download XML file and open it for example in Notepad++ you'll see that encoding is set to something else than UTF8 - I'v had the same problem with xml made myself, and it was just te encoding in the editor :)

String <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> don't set up the encoding of the document, it's only info for validator or another resource.

If you are sure that your xml is encoded in UTF-8 but contains bad characters, you can use this function to correct them :

$content = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $content);

I just had this problem. Turns out the XML file (not the contents) was not encoded in utf-8, but in ISO-8859-1. You can check this on a Mac with file -I xml_filename.

I used Sublime to change the file encoding to utf-8, and lxml imported it no issues.

I solved this using

$content = utf8_encode(file_get_contents('http://example.com/rss.xml'));
$xml = simplexml_load_string($content);

Can you open the 3rd party XML source in Firefox and see what it auto-detects as encoding? Maybe they are using plain old ISO-8859-1, UTF-16 or something else.

If they declare it to be UTF-8, though, and serve something else, their feed is clearly broken. Working around such a broken feed feels horrible to me (even though sometimes unavoidable, I know).

If it's a simple case like "UTF-8 versus ISO-8859-1", you can also try your luck with mb_detect_encoding().

After several tries i found htmlentities function works.

$value = htmlentities($value)

We recently ran into a similar issue and was unable to find anything obvious as the cause. There turned out to be a control character in our string but when we outputted that string to the browser that character was not visible unless we copied the text into an IDE.

We managed to solve our problem thanks to this post and this:

preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x7F]/', '', $input);