PHP htmlentities or htmlspecialchars

Question

I'm using fwrite to create an xml file but i'm losing the special the characters.

Example:

$message0  = htmlspecialchars('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>');
$file = fopen("test.xml","w");
echo fwrite($file,"$message0");
fclose($file);

The above code gives me the following output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><JobTemplates>

I need the special characters in order for the xml file to work. If i echo the variables, the special characters appear on the page.

Answer 1

Not understanding why you're encoding html characters for this. It's a trusted string, so, just put it in single quotes and write it. If any character's are giving you trouble, escape them instead of encoding them.

If there's a reason you must do it this way, then decode inline. But it all seems a bit messy to me.

Answer 2

Here is a tested example , you should not use htmlspecialchars

$message0  = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><contact><name>foo</name><phone>123456</phone></contact>';
$file = fopen("test.xml","w");
fwrite($file,$message0);
fclose($file);