The RSS Feed appears to have been fried by a rogue ampersand

January 30, 2003 2:36 PM

The RSS Feed appears to have been fried by a rogue ampersand. Surround the title text with CDATA tag, perhaps? XML gurus?
posted by vraxoin to Bugs at 2:36 PM (11 comments total)

Either Matt's really fast, or I'm high, because it's working now...
posted by vraxoin at 2:51 PM on January 30, 2003

a little from column A, a little from column B...
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:53 PM on January 30, 2003

I dunno if this will help, but the RSS generator on my side had the same types of troubles, and though this is PHP code I'd imagine that CFML has some kind of function that could do this:

 $text = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z ]", "", $text);

All it does is strip out everything that is NOT a letter. Sometimes that makes it look a bit funny, but it's always valid.
posted by Blake at 6:42 PM on January 30, 2003

Is there an RSS feed for MeTa?
posted by sillygwailo at 6:46 PM on January 30, 2003

Nope, no RSS feed for MetaTalk.

No soup for you!
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:14 PM on January 30, 2003

RSS Nazi!

:P
posted by sillygwailo at 9:22 PM on January 30, 2003

As far as I can remember, XML breaks with just 4 entities: left and right bracket, apostrophe and ampersand. So, instead of stripping all non-alphanumerics out, it'd be simpler to sub these 4 for their SGML codes...
posted by costas at 10:15 PM on January 30, 2003

I've seen it choke other things, like all those goofy unicode chars, so I just try to be safe, rather than sorry in this case.
posted by Blake at 5:52 AM on January 31, 2003

This thread got me curious, so I went ahead and implemented an RSS feed for my own site just for grins. The spec doesn't require CDATA wrappers and as a result most RSS feeds don't supply them, meaning that they're all liable to this sort of destruction. Some aggregators, like FeedReader, I've noticed, also choke on CDATA wrappers that are used, as well as just about anything non alphanumeric (It balked at the <I> tags in my description fields, for istance). So I guess there's some room for improvement in the protocol, as it's being implemented.
posted by vraxoin at 8:56 AM on January 31, 2003

I've found feedreader to be pretty limited. On windows, syndirella is really good and up to date.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:20 AM on January 31, 2003

On windows, syndirella is really good and up to date.

Yes, but lacking the proxy support that feedreader has.
posted by machaus at 9:57 AM on January 31, 2003