Problem with parsing an XML file

[Mr. French]

I'm writing a php program to convert a XML file into html. The XML file is
like a bookmarks, or address list.

The XML file looks something like:
<entry>
<aname>George Dummy</aname>
<aurl>http://www.georgedummy.net</aurt>
</entry>
<entry>
<aname>Fred & Wilma Flintstone</aname>
<aurl>http://fredflintstone.com</aurl>
</entry>

etc.

Now, the problem I'm having is with the '&' in the name. At first, I had
problems with xml_parse simply returning 'false' and not parsing the rest
of the file. After some playing around with htmlentities and the
translation table, I've managed to get xml_parse to succeed and continue
parsing. But, instead of getting:

"Fred & Wilma Flintstone"

in the output, I get

" Wilma Flintstone"

That's not what I want. Optimally, I want to have:

"Fred &amp; Wilma Fintstone"

in both the input and output files. That way, if I need to use other
entities, like &eacute; I can put them in the input file in the appropriate
place, and have them come out in the output file as well.

As I said, I can get all entities to work, *except* '&amp;'

At one point, I thought I was having problems with the arg_separator.input
or arg_separator.output variables, but I used ini_set to set both of these
to null and I still have problems.

Anybody have any idea what the problem is and how to fix it?

I'm running PHP on a Unix system, Redhat 7.1. The version of PHP is php
4.3.2.

[Chris]

try :

$newstring = htmlentities(string from user input);