Special Characters (ampersand) in Title break docx output

[jonnsn]

Hi,

if you change Sample_17_TitleTOC.php to add a title including an &-sign

$section->addTitle('Foo & Bar', 1);

and select docx-Result the document won't open (tested in Word 2013):
"The file ____ cannot be opened because of problems with the contents"
Details: "Invalid char"
Position: [position of the ampersand in document.xml]

I did not test this with other characters but there might also be problems with ",',< and >

I found this post which might indicate the problem.
Escaping the character does not really help (see the StackOveflow-Thread linked above).

If I find some time I will try to solve this issue and make a patch, but I just wanted to note it down here already. Maybe someone has a note or already solved it somehow :-)

Regards

Hi, @jonnsn. You must escape any string you submit to PHPWord. As for me, I prefer Zend\Escaper for that purpose. PHPWord code is not responsible for text escaping. Developer, who use PHPWord, is responsible for escaping string he passes to PHPWord. There maybe lack of documentation on that topic. Feel free to modify PHPWord documentation. ;)

[jonnsn]

Hi @RomanSyroeshko

Thanks for your reply!
if I try

$section->addTitle(htmlspecialchars('Foo & Bar'), 1);

the document gets opened and the title is correct in TOC, but not in the document body. Its plain 'Foo & amp; Bar' [added whitespace due to github interpreting the entity] there. This is also discussed in the linked StackOverflow-Thread.
According to the linked post the problem is that the TOC works with entitites while the title in the body requires Unicode escaped characters.

I just tried quick debugging and changed line 100 of PhpWord\Writer\Word2007\Element\TOC to

$xmlWriter->writeRaw(htmlspecialchars($title->getText()));

and it seemed to have worked. Maybe others could test this too...

The behavior is caused by double escaping in the code. That's why you get "& amp;" in title. I fixed this in develop branch, so $section->addTitle(htmlspecialchars('Foo & Bar'), 1); should work fine since now.

Could you please test?

[jonnsn]

sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation.
I can confirm that it works now in the sample If I do something like
$section->addTitle(htmlspecialchars('Foo & Bar'), 1);
I am still having some problems in my real application, but i will check this on my own first, as it does not seem to be related to this issue directly.

Thanks for your help!
Regards