RSS Problem

[edhan]

Hi

I hope this is the right place to ask this question.

I am creating a RSS feed for my video site but encounter a problem to display RSS feed when there is a & (ampersand) on the title page. The RSS feed will not display and checking on the problem, it say error due to whitespace.

Does anyone has any idea how to overcome this problem?

I did a test by typing & in the title page instead of just & and it works. But unfortunately I will not be able to control others from just typing & instead of & so wondering if anyone has a solution for this RSS feed problem.

[freelancedesigners.com]

you have to filter your users input before you save it

in cold fusion you use <cfset input = replace(input,'&','&amp;','all')>

php, asp, etc all have similar functions

HTH

[imvain2]

I agree with freelanddesigners.com

This is only an issue when generating the rss feed. So in your rss feed generating script just replace the & with &amp;

PHP:
$Title = str_replace("&", "&amp;", $Title);

[hyperdog]

If it isn't your site, you could run it through Yahoo pipes, perhaps. The code solutions - and staying on your site - are much better though.

[thindenim]

I had some problems with this before. There is an html_entities function in PHP, which is supposed to help, but I found it was still causing me problems. Ended up writing the following function, which covers just about everything I think! Overkill for ampersand obviously, but you may have problems with other special characters down the line.

Of course this will be no use if you are not using PHP!

Edit: Function uploaded to http://www.tdserver.co.uk/xml_rewrite.txt

Hope this helps!

[TrafficProducer]

I use:-


RSS Builder --- free ---
RSS Builder is an easy to use program to create RSS news feeds and podcasts for your web site. It provides a simple interface that lets you add topics, links, content, and enclosures, then publish the RSS (v2.0) feed to your web server, using the built-in FTP client.


(The HTML edite option, displays/edit WYSIWYG)

Nar You. Information. Research. News. Publish your own RSS Feed FREE Webpage at Nar You. Information. Research. News.

[brucet]

We had exactly the same problem. Replacing the ampersand with %26 fixed it.

[edhan]

Hi

Thank you all for your suggestion. I will try them and see which one helps to resolve my issue.

As my RSS Feed for my site is random, is there a way to update the database for all existing & with &amp; ?

Thanks for all your kindest suggestion.

[wige]

The problem with running something on your database is that if the data is used in other parts of your site, other apps might break. If possible, I would recommend editing the script that displays the RSS file to the viewer to replace the ampersands.

[edhan]

Hi

I have tested as all suggested and found suggestion by imvain2 on this works perfectly!

PHP:
$Title = str_replace("&", "&amp;", $Title);

I used thindenim method but it scrambled up the RSS feed though it works too.

Yes, I do agree with wige as it is best to do that.

Thanks a million for all your help that I have resolved this issue.

[thindenim]

Glad to hear it's all working, I know from experience it can be frustrating.

[edhan]

Yes. Glad that I got rid of the frustration especially RSS is so common nowadays.

BTW, do you know how do I program to show the correct URL with 2 different link_identifiers but with only one printout.

One is $db1 and the other is $db2.


print "<title>";
print "$db1";
print "</title>\n";

What can I do so it can select either $db1 or $db2 ?

[kgun]

First of all RSS is XML, that is not-wellformed and therefore invalid with & but well-formed and valid with &amp;

That was solved though.

To your second question, can that not be done with XSL(T) or PHP or whatever scripting language you use, conditional programming?

Originally Posted by edhan

BTW, do you know how do I program to show the correct URL with 2 different link_identifiers but with only one printout.

May be you need to use XLink. See the second link in my signature + first link for articles about the XLink language.

[edhan]

Okay. Checking out your site now. Interesting to see that your daughter designs your first webpage.

Will let you know if your site has the solution for me.

Thanks!

[kgun]

Yes, and you are aware of all the PHP inbuilt functions like $_SERVER etc?

P.S. Helene, my daughter designed the background in Adobe Photoshop some years ago. Now, she is educating herself as a teacher for art designers. May be, it was the second site? I am not 100 % sure.

The Epost on that site should have been eliminated, since it has a 100 % filter. It can fool somebody to contat us.

[edhan]

Yes, I am doing it as XML version=1.0. XLink seems to be able to do what I want but looking through your site, I am totally confused.

It mentions about locator and able to assign X and Y. Due to my limited knowledge, I doubt I am able to write that.

I am extracting images with description from the database by using mysql_fetch_array. Most of the images comes from one source URL but occasionally I will have one or two comes from different URLs so I am trying to figure out how I can do a link when a different URL for the image is needed.

Does anyone has any idea how to program the condition for checking?

I like the hearts floating in the air for your daugher's website.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by edhan

Yes, I am doing it as XML version=1.0. XLink seems to be able to do what I want but looking through your site, I am totally confused.

You noted the two XLink articles?

Originally Posted by edhan

I am extracting images with description from the database by using mysql_fetch_array. Most of the images comes from one source URL but occasionally I will have one or two comes from different URLs so I am trying to figure out how I can do a link when a different URL for the image is needed.

That is the correct way to fetch them from the database in my view.

Originally Posted by edhan

Does anyone has any idea how to program the condition for checking?

You can do conditional processing in XSL e.g.

xsl:if
xsl:choose, xsl:when and xsl:otherwise

etc. There is also an XPath node-set documnet() function that may be used in combination with XSLT. I am not sure that solves your problem. I think other members should enter the thread with their proposals. One good XML forum is the Norwegian W3 Schools forum. You have some clever guys there that may help you if my hints or other WPW members can not help you.

Originally Posted by edhan

I like the hearts floating in the air for your daugher's website.

It is the code of a simple Java applet that we found on the internet. There are 1000's of similar that you can copy free and paste into your code.

You find the most important XML technologies by scrolling down this page.

[edhan]

I was reading up the IF condition but still blur about it.

Anyone knows how I can use this command:

If ....

Elseif ....

Else ....

How do I write this command so that I can extract 2 different link_identifiers but with only one printout using the above command.