How can one handle or avoid the issue of receiving unexpected characters at the beginning of an XML file when using file_get_contents in PHP?

When using file_get_contents in PHP to read an XML file, unexpected characters at the beginning can cause parsing issues. To handle this, you can remove any unwanted characters before parsing the XML content. One way to do this is by using a regular expression to strip out any characters that are not part of the XML structure. 

$xml = file_get_contents('example.xml');
$xml = preg_replace('/[^\x20-\x7E]/', '', $xml); // Remove non-printable ASCII characters
$xmlObject = simplexml_load_string($xml);

Keywords

file_get_contents XML file unexpected characters handling PHP

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