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

Question

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?

Solution 1

Your 0xED 0x6E 0x2C 0x20 bytes correspond to "ín, " in ISO-8859-1, so it looks like your content is in ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8. Tell your data provider about it and ask them to fix it, because if it doesn't work for you it probably doesn't work for other people either.

Now there are a few ways to work it around, which you should only use if you cannot load the XML normally. One of them would be to use utf8_encode(). The downside is that if that XML contains both valid UTF-8 and some ISO-8859-1 then the result will contain mojibake. Or you can try to convert the string from UTF-8 to UTF-8 using iconv() or mbstring, and hope they'll fix it for you. (they won't, but you can at least ignore the invalid characters so you can load your XML)

Or you can take the long, long road and validate/fix the sequences by yourself. That will take you a while depending on how familiar you are with UTF-8. Perhaps there are libraries out there that would do that, although I don't know any.

Either way, notify your data provider that they're sending invalid data so that they can fix it.

---

Here's a partial fix. It will definitely not fix everything, but will fix some of it. Hopefully enough for you to get by until your provider fix their stuff.

function fix_latin1_mangled_with_utf8_maybe_hopefully_most_of_the_time($str)
{
    return preg_replace_callback('#[\\xA1-\\xFF](?![\\x80-\\xBF]{2,})#', 'utf8_encode_callback', $str);
}

function utf8_encode_callback($m)
{
    return utf8_encode($m[0]);
}

Solution 2

I solved this using

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

Solution 3

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);

Solution 4

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);

Solution 5

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

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$connection);

Cheers.

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Comments

[Camsoft]

mb_detect_encoding() says the content is UTF-8 yet if it were valid UTF-8 would the XML parser complain about it?

[Pekka]

@Camsoft strange. Can you try it with Firefox? Can you boil it down to the character that creates the problem? Are you at liberty to publish the URL to the XML feed?

[Camsoft]

This is very helpful. I was able to fix the XML by using utf8_encode(). Can you tell me how you deciphered the encoding from the string 0xED 0x6E 0x2C 0x20?

[Josh Davis]

ISO-8859-1 is widely used in the Western world. If it's not UTF-8, it's usually ISO-8859-1. (or cp1252) As for the value of each byte, I just looked up at the char table.

[Erin Drummond]

Worked for me too, in my case the XML didn't declare an encoding and came from one of those "Enterprise" systems so had weird encoding anyway

[RuudVanNistelrooy]

I had the same issue when using DOMDocument->load(), this solution works fine, just have to use ->loadXML on the result of file_get_contents

[Cagy79]

Works for me too! I was receiving files with ANSI characters in an XML file with a UTF-8 encoding.

[Mostafa90]

why using $ before content please, i have an error cause of it ?