How to replace $str = new SimpleXMLElement($str) in PHP 5.3?

Question

PHP

The code $str = new SimpleXMLElement($str) throws an error, the string contains:

<div class="path">
    <a href="http://site/" class="start">Главная</a>
    <span>–</span>
    <a href="http://site/about.html">О нас</a> 
    <span>–</span>
    Схемы этажей
</div>

you need to process element by element, everything works on PHP 7.x, you need to get an object ...

Answer 1

helped to turn on the display of errors, an invalid character is white and an incorrect encoding, the output again had to be in a different encoding

$str = mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-8", "windows-1251");
    $str = str_replace("&ndash", '-', $str);

    // ОШибочки
    libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
    $xml = simplexml_load_string($str);
    if (false === $xml) {
        $errors = libxml_get_errors();
        echo 'Errors are ' . var_export($errors, true);
        throw new \Exception('invalid XML');
    }