title: What is happening when SimpleXML parses XML with special characters?
body: <p>I am trying to solve this problem I am having with my final output. </p>
  
  <p>The XML feed looks like this...</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?&gt;
  &lt;rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"&gt;
  &lt;channel&gt;
  &lt;item&gt; &lt;title&gt;TRON: Legacy, 2010 - ★★★&lt;/title&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like to preserve the stars in the final output but my final output looks like this...</p>
  
  <p><b>TRON: Legacy, 2010 - â˜…â˜…â˜…</b></p>
  
  <p>Here is the code I am using in PHP - </p>
  
  <pre><code>$title = $item-&gt;title; 
  $movieLink = $item-&gt;link;
  
  $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
  echo "&lt;div class=\"movies\"&gt;";
  echo "&lt;a href=\"$movieLink\"&gt;$title&lt;/a&gt;";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I know this might be an encoding issue of some kind and I've tried converting the string using htmlentities but with no luck. Any help will be greatly appreciated.</p>