simplexml escape characters (e.g. &)

[Komikio]

Hi there,I'm using PHP 5 and the simplexml. I have some XML file with a tag <description>, for example:

<description>Hello <br>world</description>

However, when I load the xml-file with simplexml it automatically replaces the <br> with <br>. This is not what I want, since my goal is to insert the data into a MySQL database (& in a field gives an unterminated entity reference error in MySQL). Now I have to manually replace the '<', '>' and '&' again with < etc.Is there a way to circumvent this and let simplexml read > as > and not as '>' so I can directly insert it into the database?Thanks!

[justsomeguy]

I've never used simplexml, but if you can get the contents of the description tag in a string, before you insert it into the database you can use htmlentities to convert all applicable characters:http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

[Komikio]

Some searching already brought me to htmlentities but thanks. Too bad it seems that it cannot be done in one step.