RSS " -> ?

March 23, 2006 10:15 AM

When users make FPPs with curly quotes, they are not properly encoded in the RSS feed. Instead of their respective entities (“, ”), they are replaced with question marks. This is in the RSS feed, not an error on the part of my RSS readers (NetVibes, NewsGator, and NetNewsWire for the record). Is this intended behavior, or a bug?
posted by charmston to Bugs at 10:15 AM (12 comments total)

Oddly enough, they show up correctly in Bloglines.
posted by mendel at 10:54 AM on March 23, 2006

Doesn't look like my problem.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:30 AM on March 23, 2006

I get the "?"s in NewsFire on my Powerbook, too.
posted by maxreax at 11:30 AM on March 23, 2006

And they fuck up the links, too.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:19 PM on March 23, 2006

Matt: The feed validates fine, because it's perfectly legal to put question marks in a description. The problem is that they're not question marks in the original post.

They're definitely there in the feed -- I even retrieved it with curl and ran it through 'od' to see what the individual bytes were. I can't explain how Bloglines is not affected.
posted by mendel at 1:36 PM on March 23, 2006

Wait, yes I can! Bloglines is using the Atom feed. Only the RSS feed is affected, and it's definitely occurring at the server end. Apologies for the red herring.
posted by mendel at 1:39 PM on March 23, 2006

And they fuck up the links, too.

People really, really shouldn't create HTML in Word.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:40 PM on March 23, 2006

Can't you just set up a quick curly quote to real quote find-n-replace wherever it is that text gets thrown into the DB? There's surely no legitimate use for the things.
posted by reklaw at 2:27 PM on March 23, 2006

Here's an interesting article about the use of curly quotes in HTML.
posted by charmston at 4:10 PM on March 23, 2006

“People really, really shouldn't create HTML in Word.”

I go through periods where I like to use proper double quotes and periods where I don't. I do, however, always use a proper emdash. I do not use word. With the exception of markup, Word replacing a double apostrophe with the correct double-quote is The Right Thing. Because the only reason double apostrophe became the norm is because we had to use a limited character set. It's not that the double-quotes are something "extra". They're basic punctuation.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:17 PM on March 23, 2006

Ethereal Bligh, the quotes in question were in the middle of an <a href>.
posted by mendel at 3:49 PM on March 25, 2006

Yes, I understand that.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 10:50 PM on March 25, 2006