Garbled characters in RSS feed

  • Resolved topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)


    17 years, 3 months ago

    One of my blogs contains html formatted text that I have copied and pasted from other places. After some manual adaptation, the texts and pictures show up pretty well in WP. (http://www.topsoft.be/myblog). Even foreign characters, apostrophes and the like show up like they should. But when I look into my RSS feed, most of these non ascii charcters are replaced by their (I suppose Unicode) code like ‘ When I look into the source of the page it gets even more bizarre: there the ampersand is replaced like this: ‘

    The RSS reader I use is Sharpreader and displays foreign characters without any problem. So the problem lies within WP I think.

    I have seen a thread on this forum of someone who said that it was possible to include or add CDATA statements in
    wp-rss.php, wp-rss2.php, wp-atom.php, but before trying that I would much appreciate if someone who has done this could give me some examples or some explanations on how to do this.

    Thanks in advance for your help.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    Now that my message has been posted, I see that the code is replaced by the character it represents…
    Sorry, my fault: the code was:
    & # 8 2 1 6 ; (without the spaces)

    moshu

    (@moshu)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    You gave the answer for your problems:
    <em.One of my blogs contains html formatted text that I have copied and pasted from other places

    It is not advisable to copy/paste code from elsewhere (just do a search and you’ll find hundreds of topics about it). Esepcially do NOT copy code into the wysiwyg monster.

    EDIT. There are instructions below how to post code without rendering… &amp;

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    Sorry to come back on this, but I have created a few posts where I typed in the text manually (without copy/paste) and the result is exactly the same as you can see here:
    http://www.topsoft.be/myblog/?feed=rss2
    The page within wp displays of course correctly…

    moshu

    (@moshu)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    I am not sure I understand what the issue is here besides the fact that the characters are “strange” for your eyes. Feeds are not supposed to be watched by humans but read by feedreaders.

    Don’t they display correctly in the feedreader you are using? I tried in Opera and on MyYahoo – and they look OK.

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    Sorry, I try to put in the code, but it simply does not work…so I cannot show you what I mean: in Sharpreader I keep getting the CODES for the characters, not the characters itself, and that happens only with the feeds from WP, not with other feeds.
    And here I have just the opposite: I put the code between code and /code, (between angular brackets)with backticks, but they are displayed as the REAL character, not as the code…

    Chris_K

    (@handysolo)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    I assume your issue is the entity encoding?
    http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html (see the entity column).

    That’s perfectly normal and rational. And browsers and Feed readers will handle it appropriately.

    So, going back to moshu’s earlier question: Aside from them bugging you when manually reading your own feed (which is not its intent!) what is the issue we’re chasing here?

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    OK, let’s try again. When I look at my posts in WP, they look completely normal. When on the other hand I look at my posts via a RSS reader (I am subscribed to them via SharpReader), then the “entities” are not displayed as the character they represent, but as the code for the entity in question.

    So my question is: Why does my feed reader does NOT handle these entities appropriately? My feed reader does handle all my other feeds like it should, only the ones from WP are not OK. I am NOT reading my own feeds manually, the feeds from WP are just one of the many feeds in my RSS reader and they are the only ones that give me a problem.

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    I have checked the page with the XHTML validator: result:

    This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

    moshu

    (@moshu)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    And I added your feeds to (my) MyYahoo – and they look OK. Can’t be something with your feedreader?

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    I checked the source of other feeds and the feeds from WP, they are completely similar with one exception: in all the other feeds I have & # 8 2 1 6; in the feed from WP I have
    & a m p ; # 8 2 1 6;
    That should explain it: instead of an entity, I see an ampersand followed by #8216, while in the other feeds the ampersand is part of the entity as it should be and so the character is displayed.
    Now the question is: is that a bug in WP and is that bug “understood” by MyYahoo while SharpReader breaks it’s teeth on it, or is it something I have done wrong in the WP configuration?

    BTW, I checked in MyYahoo, and indeed, there it is OK.
    In Internet Explorer on the other hand, it does not load…(why does that not surprise me?)

    Thread Starter topsoftbe

    (@topsoftbe)

    17 years, 3 months ago

    OK, this is the ultimate proof that something is wrong with WP 2.05: I just installed WP 2.1 beta1 and, guess what? All problems with the ampersands, quotes, ticks etc. are gone…everything works fine…splendid…VERY good news…

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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