How can one handle special characters like "&" while parsing XML in PHP?

When parsing XML in PHP, special characters like "&" may cause parsing errors. To handle this, you can use the htmlspecialchars() function to encode special characters before parsing the XML data. 

$xmlData = '<data>Special characters like & need to be encoded</data>';

// Encode special characters before parsing
$encodedXmlData = htmlspecialchars($xmlData);

// Parse the XML data
$parsedXml = simplexml_load_string($encodedXmlData);

// Access the parsed XML data
echo $parsedXml->data;

Keywords

XML parsing special characters PHP htmlentities encoding

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