Need php to encode special characters but not html tags, for inclusion in a wordpress extended rss file

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I’ve written a script that will export all the users, blogs and replies from an existing (non-wordpress) site to a wordpress extended rss file for ease of importing into a new wordpress installation, as part of a migration. This works well until it comes to a particular blog post with a special punctuation mark in a French or French Canadian phrase. 

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://example.com/wordpress_xml/export-to-wp.php
Line Number 2000, Column 270:* ... <i>l'art du duffffplacement</i> ...

I’ve cropped the full error above. Instead of uffff a character similar to a comma is shown. In the php code I have the html of the blog in a string. I need to encode this type of character without encoding any of the html tags, and after a lot of searching I so far drawn a blank. Anyone already done something like this?

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2 comments

  1. For Latin-1 you can escape characters easily with:

    $html = preg_replace('/[x80-xFF]/e', '"&#x".dechex(ord("$0")).";"', $html);

    For UTF-8 it’s a bit more involving:

    $html = preg_replace_callback("/(?!w)p{L}/u", "xmlent", $html);
function xmlent($m) {
    $str = mb_convert_encoding( $m[0] , "UCS-2BE", "UTF-8");
    return "&#x" . bin2hex($str) . ";";
}

  2. After discovering the problem was about accents, I found the following functions posted on php.net, and they worked for my case, and the export file I generated imported nicely into a wordpress blog.

    function xmlentities($string) {
    // Function from: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
    // Posted by: snevi at im dot com dot ve 22-Jul-2008 01:10
    $string = preg_replace('/[^x09x0Ax0Dx20-x7F]/e', '_privateXMLEntities("$0")', $string);
    return $string;
}

function _privateXMLEntities($num) {
    // Function from: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
    // Posted by: snevi at im dot com dot ve 22-Jul-2008 01:10
        $chars = array(
    128 => '€',
    130 => '‚',
    131 => 'ƒ',
    132 => '„',
    133 => '…',
    134 => '†',
    135 => '‡',
    136 => 'ˆ',
    137 => '‰',
    138 => 'Š',
    139 => '‹',
    140 => 'Œ',
    142 => 'Ž',
    145 => '‘',
    146 => '’',
    147 => '“',
    148 => '”',
    149 => '•',
    150 => '–',
    151 => '—',
    152 => '˜',
    153 => '™',
    154 => 'š',
    155 => '›',
    156 => 'œ',
    158 => 'ž',
    159 => 'Ÿ');
    $num = ord($num);
    return (($num > 127 && $num < 160) ? $chars[$num] : "&#".$num.";" );
}