Encoding French characters in PHP

Question

I have an XML document full of "producers":

<producer>
   <name></name>
   <owner></owner>
   <address>
      <civic></civic>
      <mailing/>
      <town></town>
      <province></province>
      <postal></postal>
      <phone></phone>
      <fax></fax>
      <email></email>
      <website/>
   </address>
   <products>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
      <product></product>
   </products>
   <exports>
      <region></region>
      <region></region>
      <region></region>
      <region>l'Amérique du Nord</region>
   </exports>
</producer>

For example I want to search for the phrase "l'Amérique du Nord", which is one of the regions for this particular producer:

$query = "l'Amérique du Nord";
$xml = simplexml_load_file("../business-directory/producers-fr-nb.xml");

$upper = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÀÂÆÇÈÉÊËÎÏÔŒÙÛÜ"; 
$lower = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzàâæçèéêëîïôœùûü"; 

$nodes = $xml->xpath('//producers/producer[descendant::*[contains(translate(text(), "'.$upper.'", "'.$lower.'"), "'.$query.'")]]');

It didn't work. I determined the problem to be when I store the phrase "l'Amérique du Nord" in the string $query. When I echo $query I get this: l'Amérique du Nord

I've used functions like htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() to try encode the é but nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Look ma, I answered :)