DOMDocument and UTF-8 Problem

Discussion

1. Markus

   instead of converting the input string from your encoding into UTF8 you can also tell the DOMDocument with the 2nd arg in which encoding your string is.

   http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.construct.php

   This should save you some cpu-cycles and reduce memory consumption.
• David Walsh

  Awesome, thank you for pointing this out!
2. Whelping

   Actually I was already doing

   $html = new DOMDocument( null, 'UTF-8' );

   and still getting weird characters like  – adding your fix did the trick for me, thanks David!
• Whelping

  It turns out that specifying the encoding argument when you instantiate a DOMDocument doesn’t encode the contents, just sets the document’s header – see this comment http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.construct.php#78027. It probably wasn’t necessary to specify UTF-8 anyway, as that’s the default. So something like David’s fix is needed to change any unwanted encodings in the content.
3. Raja Amer Khan

   Thanks for the tutorial. It really saved time.
4. Dario

   Thank you very much you life saver
5. Sam

   Thank you very for this :D
   Caught this bug too, even after instantiating it properly
6. Rafael

   Awesome, character encoding has always been a pain the a.
7. Jignesh

   Thank you very much David.
   This helped me a lot. because I had bad characters in wordpress the_content.
   This method removed special characters pasted from word document.
   :D
8. Shaban

   Thanks a lot, David.
   I was about to pull my hair out :D
9. Robert Andrews

   Whilst this sorts out the worst of the character nasties, I am still seeing instances where an apostrophe appears as a question mark.

   The character on the input end is ’ … it appears as ?

   Somtimes I think what I may be experiencing is the crime of taking articles which originated in Microsoft Word, or maybe even Google Docs – ie. curly apostrophe. But I’m not sure – there are pieces of text that I’ve written out directly, which I’m not sure could explain this problem.

   It’s frustrating that I can’t iron this out. They appear just fine if I disable my code which uses DOMDocument.

   No code that I can find online (not MS Word character-conversion functions https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1262038/how-to-replace-microsoft-encoded-quotes-in-php and not DOMDocument modifiers) seems to work.
10. Rasso

    In PHP8.2, mb_convert_encoding is deprecated. Instead of

    $document->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));
    

    I am now doing this:

    $document->loadHTML(htmlspecialchars_decode(htmlentities($html)));
    

    Has been working fine in my tests