Feed not UTF-8

[EnergyFreak +]

My feed is not showing in UTF-8 format for some reason, even though I have changed it in my external.php, here is where I did the changes:

echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "\r\n";
	echo '<rss version="2.0">' . "\r\n";
	echo "<channel>\r\n";
	echo "\t<title>Petites Annonces Gratuites du Québec - Publito</title>\r\n";
	echo "\t<link>".URL."</link>\r\n";
	echo "\t<description>" . html_entity_decode($Core->settings['description']). "</description>\r\n";
	echo "\t<language>en</language>\r\n";
	echo "\t<generator>68 Classifieds</generator>\r\n";
	echo "\t<lastBuildDate>" . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . " GMT</lastBuildDate>\r\n";
	echo "\t<pubDate>" . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . " GMT</pubDate>\r\n";

Here is my feed

[EnergyFreak +]

I am not 100% sure yet but I may have solved it.

[seymourjames +]

I think you will also need to use CDATA like this as you are using French accented characters.


// print out the page header
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "\r\n";
echo '<rss version="2.0">' . "\r\n";
echo "<channel>\r\n";
echo "\t<title>French Property News</title>\r\n";
echo "\t<link>".URL."</link>\r\n";
echo "\t<description><![CDATA[" . html_entity_decode($Core->settings['description']). "]]></description>\r\n";
echo "\t<language>en</language>\r\n";
echo "\t<generator>68 Classifieds</generator>\r\n";
echo "\t<lastBuildDate>" . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . " GMT</lastBuildDate>\r\n";
echo "\t<pubDate>" . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . " GMT</pubDate>\r\n";


and a bit further down like this


echo "\t\t\t".'<title><![CDATA['. $listing['title'] . $seperator . $price .']]></title>'."\r\n";

[EnergyFreak +]

Hmm... That is interesting, i'll test it out to see if everything works fine and if not I will try your CDATA tags.

[EnergyFreak +]

I wrapped all my titles and descriptions with CDATA tags but still no luck. Although now the special characters are replaced with different symbols. My feed on my website is working fine but my feed on other web sites is not showing them properly, is this normal?

This is what I get instead of an É = &permil; and for an à &euro;

[EnergyFreak +]

I found this little document on the internet but I am not sure I completely understand this.

Telling the parser about your entities

You're not restricted to just the five named character entities covered above. In fact, you can use any that you want as long as you tell the parser what each name means.

Whether or not your document is based on an existing DTD, you can always declare your own entities in an internal DTD subset. This (optional) portion of a document's prolog looks something like the following.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE rootelem [
<!ENTITY name "value">
]>
<rootelem>...</rootelem>

Here, rootelem would be replaced with the name of whatever your own document's root element is. As for the entity declaration, name will be whatever you want your entity to appear as in your document (that is, the text that appears between the & and ; characters); and value will be what you want the parser to substitute in the document when it encounters the entity reference.

For example,

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE names [
<!ENTITY ccedilla "ç">
]>
<names>
<name>Franc&ccedilla;ois</name>
</names>

The parser -- and any downstream application to which it passes data -- will read this name as "François."

Would this mean that I would be able to declare all my special characters inside my feed?

[seymourjames +]

contact me on my email and i will send you the external.php file I use.

[EnergyFreak +]

Problem solved, Your feed worked perfectly, all I had to change was the enconding format to utf-8 and everything worked.

Thanks.

[seymourjames +]

Glad to be of assistance.