You shouldn't need CDATA around $product['name'] as that will already be escaped in the database. If it's not then you will have bigger problems.

You shouldn't need CDATA around $product['name'] as that will already be escaped in the database. If it's not then you will have bigger problems.

Yes I know it will be escaped. In our products it escapes special characters as well. For example it makes ä to ä The escaped character then crashes the sitemap.

Yes I know it will be escaped. In our products it escapes special characters as well. For example it makes ä to ä The escaped character then crashes the sitemap.

That's because XML only has 5 predefined character entities, unlike HTML.

When you wrap in CDATA you are saying to ignore any markup. So once parsed the result is ä and not ä. The same for &. & outside CDATA will correctly be parsed as &, but & inside CDATA will be parsed as &, which would be incorrect. So you change brakes encoding for everyone else who are not writing data directly to the database.

In your case you would need to decode the entities and then just encode the ones valid in XML. Or use a numeric character reference.

You shouldn't need CDATA around $product['name'] as that will already be escaped in the database. If it's not then you will have bigger problems.

Agree. Just tested it with the ä character in a product name, it ends up just fine as the UTF-8 Unlaut-a character in the image caption and image title. So I removed the CDATA, see 209a574