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?

Answer 1

Hello,

Try this:

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

Hope it helps!!

Thank you!!