Generating XML document in PHP (escape characters)

Viewed 409 times

I'm generating an XML document from a PHP script and I need to escape the XML special characters. I know the list of characters that should be escaped; but what is the correct way to do it?

Should the characters be escaped just with backslash (') or what is the proper way? Is there any built-in PHP function that can handle this for me?

Answers

Use the DOM classes to generate your whole XML document. It will handle encodings and decodings that we don't even want to care about.

Edit: This was criticized by @Tchalvak:

The DOM object creates a full XML document, it doesn't easily lend itself to just encoding a string on it's own.

Which is wrong, DOMDocument can properly output just a fragment not the whole document:

$doc->saveXML($fragment);

which gives:

Test &amp; <b> and encode </b> :)
Test &amp;amp; &lt;b&gt; and encode &lt;/b&gt; :)

as in:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$fragment = $doc->createDocumentFragment();

// adding XML verbatim:
$xml = "Test &amp; <b> and encode </b> :)n";
$fragment->appendXML($xml);

// adding text:
$text = $xml;
$fragment->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($text));

// output the result
echo $doc->saveXML($fragment);

See Demo

Monday, November 28, 2022

yckwan419-2e3063bc1417

On some installations, there is a bug in pecl. Find this line;

exec $PHP -C -n -q $INCARG -d date.timezone=UTC -d output_buffering=1 -d variables_order=EGPCS -d safe_mode=0 -d register_argc_argv="On" $INCDIR/peclcmd.php "$@"

remove the -n

If you want to script it, try:

sed -i "$ s|-n||g" /usr/bin/pecl

Monday, October 24, 2022

max.mustermann

SimpleXML cannot handle comments, but the DOM extension can. Here's how you can extract all the comments. You just have to adapt the XPath expression to target the node you want.

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadXML(
    '<doc>
        <node><!-- First node --></node>
        <node><!-- Second node --></node>
    </doc>'
);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

foreach ($xpath->query('//comment()') as $comment)
{
    var_dump($comment->textContent);
}

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

stephane_janicaud

If anyone should be interested, i have provided the correct answer:

$soapUrl = "http://privpakservices.schenker.nu/package/package_1.3/packageservices.asmx?op=SearchCollectionPoint";

$xml_post_string = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"><soap12:Body><SearchCollectionPoint xmlns="http://privpakservices.schenker.nu/"><customerID>XXX</customerID><key>XXXXXX-XXXXXX</key><serviceID></serviceID><paramID>0</paramID><address>RiksvŠgen 5</address><postcode>59018</postcode><city>Mantorp</city><maxhits>10</maxhits></SearchCollectionPoint></soap12:Body></soap12:Envelope>';

$headers = array(
"POST /package/package_1.3/packageservices.asmx HTTP/1.1",
"Host: privpakservices.schenker.nu",
"Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8",
"Content-Length: ".strlen($xml_post_string)
); 

$url = $soapUrl;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml_post_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$response = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch);

$response1 = str_replace("<soap:Body>","",$response);
$response2 = str_replace("</soap:Body>","",$response1);

$parser = simplexml_load_string($response2);

Thursday, September 29, 2022

rahulmishra

I personally prefer XML::LibXML - Perl binding for libxml. One of the pros - it uses one of the fastest XML processing library available. Here is an example for creating text node:

use XML::LibXML;
my $doc = XML::LibXML::Document->new('1.0',$some_encoding);
my $element = $doc->createElement($name);
$element->appendText($text);
$xml_fragment = $element->toString();
$xml_document = $doc->toString();

And, never, ever create XML by hand. It's gonna be bad for your health when people find out what you did.

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

ayush_surana

Only authorized users can answer the search term. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged :

php

xml

Generating XML document in PHP (escape characters)

Answers

php,xml