PHP trim function always returns string length

rinascimentoman

Hello,

I'm working with the Twitter API, and upon issuing a call, I get an XML string with some information before it. I took out the extra characters and just to be sure I ended up with a clean XML string, I issued the trim() function. The result is the following:

string(1819) "
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user>
<id>45092875</id>
<name>Ramell</name>
<screen_name>YaBoyMell3</screen_name>
<location>ÜT: 40.754951,-73.772651</location>
<description></description>
etc. etc. etc.
</status>
</user>
"

Notice that the string length is returned always, as well as enclosing the ENTIRE XML string in QUOTES. When I issue a simplexml_load_string command, I get parse error because it doesn't see the "<" character as the first one in the XML string.

I'm stuck because PHP always returns the string length and I can't get rid of it. The simplexml_load_string won't work at all.

Is there any way to turn off the string length parameter? Or is the problem something else?

Thanks very much for your help!!

laserlight

What was the contents of the original string and how exactly did you use trim()?

NogDog

Looks like you're using [man]var_dump/man to generate that output. Perhaps you want to use [man]echo[/man] or [man]print/man, instead?

rinascimentoman

Thank you very much... I tried echo and came up with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user>
<id>35715519</id>
<name>Paule</name>
etc etc etc.
<geo/>
</status>
</user>

However, I'm still not able to issue simplexml_load_string(). The only thing I can think of is that there appears to be an extra LF before <?xml_version......?>. Can I get rid of it by strpos($var) - 1 and then issuing a trim() function? Do I have to specify the htmlspecialchars for LF?

johanafm

On the doc page for trim, you can see exactly what characters are handled. trim() removes all explicitly or implicitly specified characters from the beginning and the end of the string. strpos() anything has no bearing on this behaviour.

There is no htmlspecialchar for LF, which you can also see on its documentaion page (user the search function when you're looking at the docs for the other function). But most of the time it simply will not be shown to the user due to the HTML spec on how user clients should deal with whitespaces. The only place it will show up (most of the time) is when viewing the source of the page.