Getting an invalid character DOMException error. I've implemented htmlentities to change special characters but no luck

Question

The character set of the CSV file I'm exporting to XML is ASCII so it should be working.

I think the function may not be implemented correctly? No errors are thrown but the original error remains unchanged.

Here's the full error followed by the code:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'DOMException' with message 'Invalid Character Error' in /home/paul/public_html/csv2xml.php:30 Stack trace: #0 /home/paul/public_html/csv2xml.php(30): DOMDocument->createElement('Listdate (YYYY-...') #1 {main} thrown in /home/paul/public_html/csv2xml.php on line 30

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
ini_set('display_errors', true);
ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings', true);

$inputFilename    = 'input.csv';
$outputFilename   = 'output.xml';

// Open csv to read
$inputFile  = fopen($inputFilename, 'rt');

// Get the headers of the file
$headers = fgetcsv($inputFile);

// Create a new dom document with pretty formatting
$doc  = new DomDocument();
$doc->formatOutput   = true;

// Add a root node to the document
$root = $doc->createElement('rows');
$root = $doc->appendChild($root);

// Loop through each row creating a <row> node with the correct data
while (($row = fgetcsv($inputFile)) !== FALSE)
{
 $container = $doc->createElement('row');

 foreach ($headers as $i => $header)
 {
  $child = $doc->createElement(htmlentities($header));
  $child = $container->appendChild($child);
     $value = $doc->createTextNode($row[$i]);
     $value = $child->appendChild($value);
 }

 $root->appendChild($container);
}

echo $doc->saveXML();
?>

Answer 1

Contingent on running PHP 5.4+, try the ENT_XML1 flag in htmlentities:

$child = $doc->createElement(htmlentities($header, ENT_XML1));

If you are stuck with an older version of PHP, I suggest grabbing any of the flavors of XML entity encoding functions found in the php.net comments for htmlentities

Answer 2

Caused by an invalid element name in DOMDocument->createElement() - See this answer