magento2: Magento 2.1 EE: simplexml_load_string() error in custom widget

Preconditions

OS of the server: Debian (Virtualized, with 3GB of memory)
OS of the client: Windows 7
* Browser of the client*: Chrome Version 52.0.2743.116 m (64-bit). Also tried with Firefox 44.0.2
MySQL: Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.6.31
PHP: PHP 7.0.8-1~dotdeb+8.1 (cli) ( NTS )

Steps to reproduce

Create a custom widget from a XML file
Put a text field
In the backend Content->Widget section, add the widget to a page
In the widget content, set some HTML code like this: <p>Bonjour éàùè ô</p>

Expected result

The text should be displayed

Actual result

A warning is raised : Exception #0 (Exception): Warning: simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line 1: parser error : Entity 'eacute' not defined in /var/www/xx/vendor/magento/framework/View/Model/Layout/Merge.php on line 493

Notes:

if, instead of the text field, a I put a WYSIWYG one, and put some HTML code, it will generate entities encoded HTML
if I put only raw text: no problem.
more weird: if I put only raw text, then I save, everything is OK. And if I come later, put some HTML code (directly or via the WYSIWYG), and save, I have a warning:

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Comments: 17 (9 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I did find some sort of solution for this issue, although I’m not sure if its really a bug because technically those elements are invalid XML and shouldn’t be use in widgets. However most clients do just put in these types of characters and then Magento converts them into HTML Entities on Save and this is just read straight into XML.

If you put a preference on the _loadXmlString() method in Magento\Framework\View\Model\Layout\Merge line 491

You can do something like:

protected function _loadXmlString($xmlString)
    {
        $unescapedValues = ['&nbsp;', '&eacute;', '&agrave;', '&ugrave;', '&egrave;', '&ocirc;'];
        
        foreach ($unescapedValues as $value) {
            // wrap in CDATA to escape
            $xmlString = str_replace($value, "<![CDATA[$value]]>", $xmlString);
        }
        
        return simplexml_load_string($xmlString, 'Magento\Framework\View\Layout\Element');
    }

antbates91 on Mar 2, 2017

For anyone who doesn’t want to wait for 2.2.x you can use this small module to apply the fix https://github.com/WeareJH/m2-core-bug-simplexml-widget

Loxzibit on Nov 28, 2017