How to force XPath to use UTF8?

Question

I have an XHTML document being passed to a PHP app via Greasemonkey AJAX. The PHP app uses UTF8. If I output the POST content straight back to a textarea in the AJAX receiving div, everything is still properly encoded in UTF8.

When I try to parse using XPath

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($raw2);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$query = '//td/text()';
$nodes = $xpath->query($query);
foreach($nodes as $node) {
  var_dump($node->wholeText);
}

dumped strings are not utf8. How do I force DOM/XPath to use UTF8?

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I couldn't use tidy in my webserver. I found this solution and it worked fine:

$html = mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html); 

Answer 2

A bit late in the game, but perhaps it helps someone...

The problem might be in the output, and not in the dom/xpath object itself.

If you would output the nodeValue directly, you would get corrupted characters e.g.:

ìÂÂì ë¹Â디ì¤
ìì ë¹ë””ì¤ í°ì  íì¤

You have to load your dom object with the second param "utf-8", new \DomDocument('1.0', 'utf-8'), but still when you print the dom node list/element value you get broken characters:

echo $contentItem->item($index)->nodeValue

you have to wrap it up with utf8_decode:

echo utf8_decode($contentItem->item($index)->nodeValue) //output: 者不終朝而會，愚者可浹旬而學