Dealing with XML errors when loading documents is a very simple task. Using the libxml functionality it is possible to suppress all XML errors when loading the document and then iterate over the errors.
The libXMLError object, returned by libxml_get_errors(), contains several properties including the message, line and column (position) of the error.
Example #1 Loading broken XML string
<?php
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$sxe = simplexml_load_string("<?xml version='1.0'><broken><xml></broken>");
if ($sxe === false) {
echo "Failed loading XML\n";
foreach(libxml_get_errors() as $error) {
echo "\t", $error->message;
}
}
?>The above example will output:
Failed loading XML
Blank needed here
parsing XML declaration: '?>' expected
Opening and ending tag mismatch: xml line 1 and broken
Premature end of data in tag broken line 1
Note that "if (! $sxe) {" may give you a false-negative if the XML document was empty (e.g. "<root />"). In that case, $sxe will be:
object(SimpleXMLElement)#1 (0) {
}
which will evaluate to false, even though nothing technically went wrong.
Consider instead: "if ($sxe === false) {"If you need to process the content of your broken XML-doc you might find this interesting. It has blown past a few simple corruptions for me.
http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php#domdocument.props.recoverNow that the /e modifier is considered deprecated in preg_replace, you can use a negative lookahead to replace unescaped ampersands with & without throwing warnings:
$str = preg_replace('/&(?!;{6})/', '&', $str);
You probably should have been doing this before /e was deprecated, actually.