Hey, sometimes when I copy text from other places on the web and paste them into a weblog post, I wind up with characters in my RSS feed that Microsoft's XML parser chokes on. I always thought Microsoft's XML parser was stupid (Mozilla's would usually work fine, for example). However, as I recently copied text that contained non-ASCII characters and was manually changing them to their ASCII equivalents like I usually do, my recent foray into learning everything about character encodings paid off because I finally realized what was happening.
It turns out I declare my RSS feed to be UTF-8, but those special characters I always paste are probably all Latin-1, and while Unicode shares code points with ASCII, it doesn't share them with Latin-1. I also discovered that PHP has a handy UTF8_encode function that I was able to stick in where I generate my RSS file, and now everything is happy. I should also check out PHP's multi-byte string functions.
Friday, August 22, 2003
Permalink
Feel free to post a comment below. Please see my comment policy.
Formatting Rules (No HTML):