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Bug #46737 XML output encoding should default to UTF-8
Submitted: 2008-12-03 11:41 UTC Modified: 2008-12-03 14:50 UTC
From: sites at hubmed dot org Assigned:
Status: Not a bug Package: SimpleXML related
PHP Version: 5.2.6 OS: Mac OS X
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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 [2008-12-03 11:41 UTC] sites at hubmed dot org 
Description:
------------
Using $xml->asXML() to output an XML document as a string from SimpleXML seems to be defaulting to ISO 8859-1 rather than UTF-8, despite all other operations being in UTF-8 (and with LANG and LC_ALL being set to UTF-8).

There is a workaround, by manually setting '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' at the start of any imported XML, but it seems strange that there isn't anywhere to set this default permanently.

The behaviour of asXML() also seems to vary when printing part of a SimpleXML object (where it uses UTF-8) rather than the whole document (where it uses ISO 8859-1).

Adding
putenv('LANG=en_GB.UTF-8');
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF-8');
to the script doesn't seem to help.

Reproduce code:
---------------
// manually set encoding to UTF-8
$doc = simplexml_load_string('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><text>umlaut ? here</text>');
print $doc->asXML() . "\n";

// defaults to UTF-8
$doc = simplexml_load_string('<doc><text>umlaut ? here</text></doc>');
print $doc->text->asXML() . "\n\n";

// defaults to ISO 8859-1
$doc = simplexml_load_string('<text>umlaut ? here</text>');
print $doc->asXML() . "\n";

Expected result:
----------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<text>umlaut ? here</text>

<text>umlaut ? here</text>

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<text>umlaut ? here</text>



Actual result:
--------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<text>umlaut ? here</text>

<text>umlaut ? here</text>

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<text>umlaut &#xFC; here</text>

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 [2008-12-03 14:29 UTC] chregu@php.net 
This
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<text>umlaut &#xFC; here</text>
is UTF-8, too. Just written differently. Nothing wrong with the output 
(otherwise it would be invalid, as the default encoding is UTF-8, if 
there's nothing declared in the <?xml header.
 [2008-12-03 14:31 UTC] sites at hubmed dot org 
I wouldn't call &#xFC; UTF-8, I'd call it a numerical entity representation of a UTF-8 character, which is what libxml2 falls back on when the output contains a character that can't be handled by the output encoding.
 [2008-12-03 14:50 UTC] sites at hubmed dot org 
I've changed the title, as I found that using DOM works the same way:

===
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><text>?</text>');
print $dom->saveXML() . "\n"; // UTF-8

$dom->loadXML('<?xml version="1.0"?><text>?</text>');
print $dom->saveXML() . "\n"; // not UTF-8

print $dom->saveXML($dom->firstChild) . "\n"; // UTF-8
===

Maybe it is supposed to work this way, but it's unintuitive and it would be useful to know why.
 
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