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.