topic Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed) in Community Site Feedback

Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

MauriceC — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 10:49:47 GMT

Some characters in the page output are inconsistent in their representation. E.g. ' Single quote and - (hyphen or endash). Sometimes they are outputs as the char ' and sometimes as the escaped version ’ See attached example output from the News page in both HTML and in the RSS feed XML output.
Current browsers IE7 and FF 2.0.0.6 produce the correct output regardless of the inconsistency. BUT! When taking the RSS feed to output on the PlusNet UserGroup site I have to pre-process the string and convert the Hex 8217 to ’ to preserve the ISO8559-1 output.
See: http://usergroup.plus.net/PlusnetRSS.php
The fudge is working but there may be other incompatibility issues in other cases.

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

Colin — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:17:51 GMT

I can't check this on live, however using the test version on one of the test boxes we have, I have been able to generate all the XML for the feed.
According to http://www.feedvalidator.org/ the feed is valid, even with the difference in characters.

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

jelv — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:58:39 GMT

Is this still a problem?

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

MauriceC — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:57:10 GMT

Quote from: jelv
Is this still a problem?

Well Yes and No The odd character sequences still arrive, but I get around them in the PHP snippet code, so the end User never sees the problem.
Maurice

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

jelv — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:06:26 GMT

I subscribe to the feeds using Google reader and have never noticed any problems.
I do notice that where the code is of the &#nnn format it seems to be inside <content:encoded> tags and the rest seem to be in other tags. I suspect therefore that it is working correctly.

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

Colin — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:57:58 GMT

I don't believe this is a bug, so should be resolved.

Re: Inconsistent character 'escaping' in both HTML and XML (RSS feed)

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:20:31 GMT

Consider it duly moved on that basis then.