XML/RSS feed apostrophe

Hangin' Around Joined: Jan 18, 2006 Posts: 42

Does this happen on all rss/xml feeds?

I have a block on my site with xml from this site http://www.fastmachines.com/feeds.php

However, all apostrophes in the block are displayed "'s" instead of "'"

I saw this thread http://nukecops.com/postlite21746-.html on NukeCops and it looks like a fix, just wondering if it will affect anything else before I do it.

Should this be included in the next update?

registered · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6437

Not sure if this will break anything - the solution is somewhat vague. It's worth investigating though, since that issue isn't limited to ampersand, but is also a problem with other symbols, too. My thought would be to come up with a solution that address all the problems, rather than piecemealing it one-by-one. Still, it shouldn't hurt to test this. If it works, you'll know right away. If it doesn't work, you'll know right away. Just make backups before making any changes...

Worker Joined: Aug 22, 2006 Posts: 192

Hi Guys...Is there an update on this?

My wesbite uses Raven's RavenNuke(tm) v2.02.00 Distro and whenever my RSS Block has a headline with ' (an apostrophe), the apostrophe is displayed as '

I note that this is not a problem when viewing the RSS (block) in the Firefox browser and the problem only displayed when viewing my website in Internet Explorer.

Does anyone have a permanent solution to this small, but none the less, frustrating problem?

boxingself

registered · Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 6:29 am

Try the forumsbackend.php and backend.php scripts from the latest RavenNuke(tm) 2.10.00 release. We did a ton of work on those two scripts to make them valid RSS feeds, even when there are embedded entities. I'd be curious to know if this fixes or does not fix the problem. Wink

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 7:31 am

If I'm not mistaken the backend programs referred to are for your Nuke site on the way "out" to a RSS feed. The problem emmaphp is referring to is on the way in to Nuke from an external site. There is a little section of mainfile that "processes" these feeds but it's historically been trouble prone if the feed isn't perfect. I had to disable rss feed blocks on my site because they would constantly go down when the external feed had any "bad" data in it.

One problem is that the code in mainfile is repeated in at least one other place in Nuke (it may be blocks.php but I don't have time to look now) so you have to fix it in more than one place. Still, the techniques used in backend.php could probably be applied to "editing" the feed in mainfile and substituted for the current poor code. Just a matter of getting someone to do it and test it. The other problem, which is generic throughout Nuke, is that the SQL update statement in that section of mainfile, well, the programmer just sort of hopes it works and if there's an error you just get a message like "there's a problem with this block file" but no indication what the error was. That's bad enough as a general problem but much worse when you are trying to process external data that could have all sorts of problems with it.

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:45 am

Hi guys, thanks for going to the trouble of responding to my posting.

I understand this may be a know issue etc, but can someone explain why the problem is only displayed when I am viewing in Internet Explorer and not another browser, such as Firefox?

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 5:53 am

emmaphp, do a "View Source" on your web site and find the HTML that has been rendered for that block. Copy and paste that here within a code block (bbcode) so I can see it. Or, PM me a link to your site where I can see it. Thanks.

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 5:55 am

BTW, just a personal opinion here. I refuse to have any content from an external on my site that does not produce valid RSS/XML data. If the source doesn't care about it, I don't use it. JMO of course.