Site RSS feed isn't working :(

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dogsthat

Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby dogsthat » Wed Jan 09, 2008 9:36 pm

Just to let people know, the RSS feed on the site doesn't appear to be working :(

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microUgly
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Re: Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby microUgly » Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:20 pm

Thanks for reporting this. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to correct it now but hopefully soon.

gabi68

Re: Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby gabi68 » Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:02 pm

Still RSS not working. I receive a constant error -
Failed while reading feed: Open Clip Art Library (clip_art,remix)
Message: Reference to undeclared entity, 'ouml'. Line 21, position 11.


Maybe somebody can fix that.

Thank you
GB

gabi68

Re: Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby gabi68 » Tue Jan 29, 2008 6:37 am

Admin RSS not working!!! Someone can fix that?????????

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microUgly
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Re: Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby microUgly » Fri Feb 08, 2008 1:19 pm

I really am sorry about this problem. The code was written by myself and I simply haven't had the time to correct it. Which leaves two options, either I remove the RSS feed until I can fix it, or I leave it as is.

I believe the error is due to some users having funny keyboards that generate special characters that aren't being converted properly to a valide XML equivalent. I figure some parsers will overlook and sometimes the feeds won't contain these characters which is why I haven't removed the feed.

Fixing the feed is on my list of things to do.

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microUgly
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Re: Site RSS feed isn't working :(

Postby microUgly » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:55 am

OK. The RSS feed should now work without any further errors. Please let me know if you find this is not the case.

Even though this isn't a PHP forum, I'm going to describe the issue simply because I had so much trouble finding any resources that could help me. The issue related to character encoding and my lack of understanding. When people used special characters such as “, ” or ® some RSS parsers would throw up an error. Feed Validator confirmed there was an error with using these characters in the XML file.

My initial thought was that the characters needed to be converted to their HTML entities but the feed still didn't validate. I also tried a bunch of regular expressions to convert them to other entity formats. Then I started messing with the defined XML character encoding also without luck. I was on track with the character encoding but because I was also converting the special characters to HTML entities it was creating a conflict.

Anyway, this page explained a lot about the issues of character encoding with PHP and I found that I need to maintain the same character encoding from the posting process here on the HTML pages all the away across to the XML feed. phpBB uses UTF-8 for it's character encoding which is what all form text is sent as. So I needed to change the XML RSS feed to also use UTF-8 and I also needed to remove all code that converted special characters to HTML entities - but you still need to use htmlspecialchars() to ensure XML characters such as &, < and > were converted.

Sounds simple but it took me ages to figure out.


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