How to echo an XML string to an HTML page for debugging?

Question

Okay so I have a php script and I need to somehow view the value of one of my variables. The thing is this variable is a very long string of XML that got returned from a server. I know it has an error message in it but I need to actually see what it is saying. If I try and Print or echo the value it only displays part followed by a ... or if I use var_dump it does the same. I've even gone as far as trying to echo a javascript alert with the value but that fails because there are single and double quotes in the xml causing the alert quotes not to be recognized correctly. I just need to see the value of this variable. Any advice? Thanks.

Edit: Actually said that wrong. Echo and print don't display the value correctly because the tags are in <> brackets so it is recognizing as an html tag.

Answer 1

i usaly use:

echo nl2br(str_replace('<', '&lt;', $xml));

as its only the < that are a problem

Answer 2

You can use htmlentities to output the XML string so that you can get a plaintext view of it in a browser.

<?php echo htmlentities( $xml_string); ?>

Alternatively, you can parse the XML string to reveal the error message, but this may be more complicated than what you need.

Answer 3

Try echo htmlentities($var, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')

Answer 4

i always use this:

echo "<pre>". htmlentities($s) . "</pre>";

Answer 5

Try this:

echo '<pre>'.$xml_string.'</pre>';

See also: CDATA - (Unparsed) Character Data