HELP! XML and text encoding

steveluscher

I don't know what is going on here.. I'm generating an XML file to be read in Flash, but I'm having a lot of trouble with the text encoding. Characters such as typographers quotes, bullets, and en dashes etc come out as garbage characters.

The text is being pulled from a mySQL database and is being formed into an XML document. I have tried using utf8_encode on the whole thing before echoing it to the browser, to no avail.

Take a look at http://www.steveluscher.com/tartan/WWW/why_tartan.php

See all the boxes / garbage characters where there should be quotes and en dashes, etc...

Can we solve this? I'm going a little nutty.

Steve!

planetsim

Well i see a nice blank page?

steveluscher

Just get source on the blank page... it's all there.

I've changed things so that now it renders PERfectly in IE on PC... meaning that the encoding stuff SEEMS to be fixed, BUT when it comes into Flash, typographers quotes and bullets and en dashes get mangled....

If however I take that same source and copy it to a text document, then save that text document as a UTF-8 document and change the XML encoding tag to read UTF-8, then load that page into flash as a static XML file, instead of from the PHP script at runtime... voila. Everything works fine. It seems to me I can't control the text-encoding that PHP spits out. What to do?

Steve!

rachel2004

Rephrase your question so I can see how this is a PHP-oriented problem. So far you're talking about XML, Flash, MySQL... where are you using PHP and what help do you need with PHP in relation to XML, Flash, or MySQL?

_NL_Ren__

It might be a xml problem, though it may also be flash which uses the wrong ecoding.

first of all change you xml fom windows-1252 to iso-8859-1.

then alteral those %3Cu,%3E,%3C etc. to their %???; form. You can use htmlentities with ENT_QUOTES in php for that.

Give it a try 🙂