Problems reading in XML files with Unicode characters

[zaraza]

I'm trying to process a simple XML file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<REVIEWS>
..other nodes...
<REVIEW ID="11">
<ARTIST>BENÜMB</ARTIST>
<TITLE>SOUL OF THE MARTYR</TITLE>
<LABEL>Relapse</LABEL>
<RATING>6</RATING>
<TEXT>some tezt</TEXT>
</REVIEW>
...more nodes follow...
</REVIEWS>

But as soon as I try to load it in so I can query it via xpath, I get an error on the line that has the "Ü" in it:

$fd = fopen ("reviews/$file", "rb");
$contents = fread ($fd, filesize ("reviews/$file"));
fclose ($fd);
$dom = xmldoc($contents));

xmldoc() seems to fail with errors like:

"Entity: line 74" (line 74 is the one with the "Ü" in "BENÜMB")
"Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !"

etc..etc...

I read that PHP treats XML as UTF-8 as default, shouldn't it be able to read in such German characters by default then without any errors?

I tried encoding="ISO-8859-1", and that avoids errors...but those characters are then mangled with retrieving data via xpath using $node->get_content()...not good either.

Is this a PHP bug or an issue with the way the file was created?

I'm on PHP 4.2.3, Windows 2000, Apache.

Thanks in advance for any help...