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RSS Invalid Character Problem

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Category: Web Wiz Web App Support Forums
Forum Name: Web Wiz Forums
Forum Description: Support forum for Web Wiz Forums application.
URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=19297
Printed Date: 12 April 2026 at 9:42am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: RSS Invalid Character Problem

Posted By: neil.carter
Subject: RSS Invalid Character Problem
Date Posted: 14 April 2006 at 2:47pm

The release version still appears to have a problem with its RSS reader using IE.

http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp - http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp

Neil

Replies:

Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 14 April 2006 at 5:45pm

This is something that has been worked on to try and fix, but I guess there is still and issue with IE that occurs with certain characters.

I will look again and see if I can find a solution to this.

Posted By: wistex
Date Posted: 14 April 2006 at 6:06pm

It's not validating. I think its a problem with the encoding. Perhaps the data entered in the post / database is not UTF-8, yet your feed says that's what it should be. The offending text appears to be in ISO-8859-1 encoding. (Notice the ? instead of the ' in the word "what's" when you view it in the FireFox Browser.)

I think that the webmaster should be able to change the encoding. I prefer ISO-8859-1 myself. In WWF 7.x FireFox tries rendering the forum pages in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1, which is what the text was actually encoded in. It causes all the ' to turn into ? which is annoying.

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Posted By: wistex
Date Posted: 14 April 2006 at 6:13pm

http://feedvalidator.org/docs/error/UnicodeError.html

It looks like you either need to turn curly quotes into regular quotes, and curly apostrophes into regular apostrophes... or you need to change the encoding to ISO-8859-1, which allows those characters.

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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 10:11am

The encoding UTF-8 in tests worked the best.

I have been looking into this issue as I did do exhustive testing on this due to problems in previous versions and couldn't workout why you got this issue.

Anyway, the single quote ' that is coursing the issue in your subjects should be there as it should have been encoded on the way into the database for security reasons. This is why it didn't come up in testing.

The only thing I can think is that the version you upgraded from was modified or didn't encode the ' singe quote mark.

The only thing I therefore can suggest is that you leave it and see if the problem sorts itself out in the new version as new posts come in.

Posted By: neil.carter
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 10:24am

The version I upgraded from was installed without any modifications - I will delete the problematic post and see if I can recreate it.

Posted By: neil.carter
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 10:36am

I can recreate the problem by putting the character either into a post body or forum topic - for example

What�s New

Should cause the RSS feed to fail with an error

Posted By: neil.carter
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 10:54am

Wistex is correct - if you change the encoding of the rss feed to ISO-8859-1 you no longer get the error as you can see http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp - http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp .

Presumably this is because this is how its encoded in the database.

Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 10:58am

Your link is working fine in my copy of IE now, so it seems in version 8 full this problem has been solved.

You may have some issues with old posts for a while till they are no longer part of the RSS Feed.

Although in IE is does display a square symbol as quotes are changed to  I have changed this for the next version to ' which also gets rid of the square block issue in IE and displays quote correctly in IE

Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 11:01am

neil.carter wrote:

Wistex is correct - if you change the encoding of the rss feed to ISO-8859-1 you no longer get the error as you can see http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp - http://www.bhpc.org.uk/forum8/RSS_topic_feed.asp .

Presumably this is because this is how its encoded in the database.

It seems to on your forum, but if you try and use a space as the separator when using ISO-8859-1 it displays '?' in between dates, if you use UTF-8 it doesn't.

This is one of the biggest issues with designing this type of software is also making it generic enough to run on so many different systems with so many different setups.

Posted By: wistex
Date Posted: 15 April 2006 at 2:35pm

Yes, I bet it had to be a pain to get to work for everybody. The problem is you can tell it how you want the web page encoded (UTF-8) for example, but when someone pastes something from their Word Processor or another web page that is encoded differently, I don't think what gets saved in the database is UTF-8. It's whatever was passed to the database.

In version 7.x of WWF, I had to change WWF to display in ISO-8859-1 because of the problem of characters not showing up correctly. Almost all my users use ISO-8859-1, and the headers and footers ASP code is in ISO-8859-1 as well.

What was weird is IE 6 displayed the forums fine, FireFox 1.x (if I recall) displayed it fine, but FireFox 1.5x was screwing up the page.

What I in my articles RSS feed did that helped was surround the description content with a <![CDATE[ ]] tag, which prevents newsreaders from chocking on characters that are not valid in XML.

http://www.caribbeanchoice.com/rss.asp - http://www.caribbeanchoice.com/rss.asp

Response.Write "<description>"  & vbCrlf 
Response.Write "<![CDATA[" & vbCrlf 

IF rst("ContentAuthorDisplayName").Value <> "" THEN
    Response.Write "By " & rst("ContentAuthorDisplayName").Value    
END IF 

IF rst("ContentSubHeadline").Value <> "" THEN
Response.Write "<p>" & rst("ContentSubHeadline").Value
END IF

IF rst("ContentExcerpt").Value <> "" AND rst("ContentSubHeadline").Value <> rst("ContentExcerpt").Value THEN
    Response.Write "<p>" & rst("ContentExcerpt").Value 
END IF

IF rst("ContentExcerpt").Value = "" THEN 
    If Len(rst("ContentContent").Value) > 500 Then 
    dot = "... <a href=" & LinkURL & ">Read More...</a>" 
    Else 
    dot = ""
    End If
                  Response.Write Left(rst("ContentContent").Value,500) & "" & dot
END IF

Response.Write "]]>" & vbCrlf
Response.Write "</description>" & vbCrlf

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Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 16 April 2006 at 12:43pm

The description tag is surrounded with <![CDATE[ ]] as it is the only way to display HTML code in an RSS Feed

Posted By: wistex
Date Posted: 17 April 2006 at 6:39pm

Must be the encoding then.

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