How to read XML data from SQL Server into PHP

If you are fetching the data by hinting the PHP-data-type as shown in the blog-post you've linked:

$xml = sqlsrv_get_field($stmt, 0, SQLSRV_PHPTYPE_STRING('UTF-8'));

Then the variable $xml contains an UTF-8 encoded string. Strings in PHP are always binary and UTF-8 is the default encoding of an XML document. This is the same in PHP: DOMDocument in PHP expects all input strings to be UTF-8 encoded (as outlined in the Introduction^Docs).

All you need to do is to load the XML as string^Docs:

$doc   =  new DOMDocument();
$result = $doc->loadXML($xml);

You can then verify if this works by checking the return value and outputting the XML as string from the document:

var_dump($result);          # should be (boolean) TRUE
$doc->save('php://output'); # should be your XML verbatim

this should do it, let me know if you use a different way to fetch from the database. Because then this might work differently, e.g. if you are getting a PHP Stream^Docs you might want to use stream_get_contents()^Docs to convert the stream into a string first. You can not load streams with DOMDocument in PHP, this is why you need to convert it first to a string.

See as well:

• Default PHP Data Types - SQL Server 2008 R2^MSDN
• How to: Specify PHP Data Types - SQL Server 2008 R2^MSDN