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POSpecial characters from MySQL database (e.g. curly apostrophes) are mangling my XML
 

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  1. POSpecial characters from MySQL database (e.g. curly apostrophes) are mangling my XML
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    <p>I have a MySQL database of newspaper articles. There's a volume table, an issue table, and an article table. I have a PHP file that generates a property list that is then pulled in and read by an iPhone app. The plist holds each article as a dictionary inside each issue, and each issue as a dictionary inside each volume. The plist doesn't actually hold the whole article -- just a title and URL.</p> <p>Some article titles contain special characters, like curly apostrophes. Looking at the generated XML plist, whenever it hits a special character, it unpredictably gobbles up a whole bunch of text, leaving the XML mangled and unreadable.</p> <p>(...in Chrome, anyway, and I'm guessing on the iPhone. Firefox actually handles it pretty well, showing a white ? in a black diamond in place of any special characters and not gobbling anything.)</p> <p><strong>Example well-formed plist snippet:</strong></p> <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"&gt; &lt;plist version="1.0"&gt; &lt;dict&gt; &lt;key&gt;Rows&lt;/key&gt; &lt;array&gt; &lt;dict&gt; &lt;key&gt;Title&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;Vol. 133 (2003-2004)&lt;/string&gt; &lt;key&gt;Children&lt;/key&gt; &lt;array&gt; &lt;dict&gt; &lt;key&gt;Title&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;No. 18 (Apr 2, 2004)&lt;/string&gt; &lt;key&gt;Children&lt;/key&gt; &lt;array&gt; &lt;dict&gt; &lt;key&gt;Title&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;Basketball concludes historic season&lt;/string&gt; &lt;key&gt;URL&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article_iphone.php?date=2004-04-02&amp;amp;section=1&amp;amp;id=1&lt;/string&gt; &lt;/dict&gt; &lt;!-- ... --&gt; &lt;/array&gt; &lt;/dict&gt; &lt;/array&gt; &lt;/dict&gt; &lt;/array&gt; &lt;/dict&gt; &lt;/plist&gt; </code></pre> <p><strong>Example of what happens when it hits a curly apostrophe:</strong> This is from Chrome. This time it ate 5,998 characters, by MS Word's count, skipping down to midway through the opening the title of a pizza story; if I reload it'll behave differently, eating some other amount. The proper title is: Singer-songwriter Farrell ’05 finds success beyond the bubble</p> <pre><code> &lt;dict&gt; &lt;key&gt;Title&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;Singer-songwriter Farrell ing&gt;Students embrace free pizza, College objects to solicitation&lt;/string&gt; &lt;key&gt;URL&lt;/key&gt; &lt;string&gt;http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article_iphone.php?date=2009-09-18&amp;amp;section=1&amp;amp;id=9&lt;/string&gt; &lt;/dict&gt; </code></pre> <p>In MySQL that title is stored as (in binary):</p> <pre><code>53 69 6E 67 |65 72 2D 73 |6F 6E 67 77 |72 69 74 65 72 20 46 61 |72 72 65 6C |6C 20 C2 92 |30 35 20 66 69 6E 64 73 |20 73 75 63 |63 65 73 73 |20 62 65 79 6F 6E 64 20 |74 68 65 20 |62 75 62 62 |6C </code></pre> <p>Any ideas how I can encode/decode things properly? If not, any idea how I can get around the problem some other way?</p> <p>I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, haha; let me know if there's any way I can help you help me. :) And many thanks!</p>
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