Special characters in feed titles make them unreadable!

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

I am getting feed titles such as "âIâm absolutely gobsmackedâ: Former landmark ......." which clearly means the feed title is unreadable. Sometime back I recall updating a template to overcome this issue but now some feed titles have the issue re-appearing. Grateful if anyone could advise me how to correct this issue.

Regards, Dave.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2806

What's the link to your feed? This usually happens when your website doesn't use UTF-8 encoding but I'd like to have a look to be sure.

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

Hi,

2 of the RSS links are as below:

http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/rss/

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/latest/rss

Regards,

Dave.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2806

Dave,

That's a bit odd, both of your feeds are missing the encoding declaration.

You'll want to add encoding="UTF-8" to your RSS header.

For example, with this feed:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/latest/rss

you would want to update this:
<rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0">

to this:
<rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" encoding="UTF-8" version="2.0">

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

Sorry but are you saying in the header of the page that is calling the feeds?

My code looks like this:

[color=blue]<p>

<?php

$XMLFILE = "http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/rss/";
$TEMPLATE = "sample-template-short-2012.html";
$MAXITEMS = "5";
include("rss2html.php");

?>

</p>
[/color]
Grateful if you could be a little more specific in where the code needs to go.

Thanks,

Dave.

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

Ah I see it, in the sample template header?

Regards,

Dave.

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

[quote="ArmouredWurzel"]Ah I see it, in the sample template header?[/quote]

I must be looking in the wrong place as id did not fix the problem!

Grateful for your guidance.

Dave.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2806

Without knowing the encoding of the source feeds (they don't seem to include one) you kind of have to guess which one to use in your template.

If utf-8 isn't helping, then the next most popular is this:

encoding="iso-8859-1"

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

I assume that you can only have one? Am I right that it goes in the template header?
Regards, Dave.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2806

Correct, you can only have one and it will need to go in the template header.

ArmouredWurzel · Joined: 30 Jul 2013 Posts: 9 Location: UK

Still not worked, looking at the BBC weather feed I see it gives the encoding in the feed as UTF-8, does that mean you need no encoding statement in the template?
Secondly, although it has UTF-8 as the encoding, the letter "A" characters have the character ^ above it, otherwise they appear correct.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2806

If you are using RSS2HTML to insert a feed into an existing webpage, then the encoding declared at the top of the HTML source for the whole webpage comes into play too, as it will be what the browser uses.

Since a webpage can only support one encoding you can run into situations where some text just can't be displayed correctly.

For example, if the encoding that your webpage needs is different than the encoding used in the RSS feed you are inserting. Or, if you are inserting multiple RSS feeds into a single webpage, and they each have different encodings.