Encode German characters in XML

[Sebarry]

Hi,

I'm doing some work for a German website. They want to be able to type in characters for which there are HTML entities like

Ü ü ä

. The plain text should be stored in a database so it can be later retrieved and read into an XML file. The XML file is read by a Flash file to create a news ticker.

Unfortunately the ticker is displaying some characters incorrectly. I thought that you would need to use html_entities when writing to the database, html_entity_decode when reading from it and the ISO encoding in the XML file. Could anyone tell me where I'm going wrong.

 
// Writing to the database.
 
$sql = "UPDATE news SET title = " . '"' . htmlentities( addslashes($_POST['title']), ENT_QUOTES, 'ISO-8859-1' ) . '"' . ", article = " . '"' . 
        addslashes($_POST['article']) . '"' . ", summary = " . '"' . addslashes($_POST['summary']) . '"';
    if(isset($filename1)) $sql .= ", image_file = '$filename1' ";
    $sql .= "WHERE news_id = {$_POST['articleId']}";
 
// Reading from the database.
$sql = "SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY news_id DESC";
    $result = $con->sqlExecute($sql);
 
    $xmlContent = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>\n";
    $xmlContent .= "<ticker>\n";
 
    while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)){
        $xmlContent .= "<topic>\n";
        $xmlContent .= "<text><![CDATA[<font size=\"12px\" color=\"#624A9E\"><b>" . html_entity_decode( $row['title'], ENT_QUOTES, 'ISO-8859-1' ) . "</b></font><br /><font size=\"12px\" color=\"#686868\">$row['summary'] )...</font><br /><font size=\"12px\" color=\"#624A9E\"><b>Read more</b></font>]]></text>\n";
        $xmlContent .= "<link>NewsDetail.php?news_id={$row['news_id']}</link>\n";
        $xmlContent .= "<targetIsUrl>Y</targetIsUrl>\n";
        $xmlContent .= "</topic>";
    }
 
// First line of XML.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
 
 

Thanks,

Sean

[MarkoKlacar]

Hi Sean,

I've done a simliar thing but with swedish characters, ÅÄÖåäö, I did not do any of the things you are talking about and it worked out fine, the PHP bit.

Maybe the flash is doing something nasty to the characters.