RSSxl Support Forums - Doesn't handle entity references

RSSxl Support Forums / RSSxl Support / Doesn't handle entity references

Author	Message
dnl2ba Member	Posted: 12 May 2005 08:43:02 I'm trying to make a feed out of a vBulletin board thread listing. It works great, but it looks like you're encoding entity references... including ampersands that delimit the start of entity references in the source page. This means any URL that already has an entity reference-encoded query string will be broken.
dnl2ba Member	Posted: 12 May 2005 08:56:52 Also, this demonstrates a use case where it'd be useful to be able to define descriptions that are outside of the "item," or maybe specify the item, link in the item, and description in the item separately. See, in vBulletin, the description comes paired with the link least useful in RSS: the link to the first page of a thread. What one would want with RSS is the link to the last page of the thread, naturally, which vBulletin has in a subsequent link with text that's less useful in an RSS title (it's the last poster's name). Forum example BTW, awesome service you're providing here.
wotz Admin	Posted: 13 May 2005 18:26:52 Hi dnl2ba, Thanks for the input. RSSxl is not encoding ampersands in links. The encoded ampersands are already in the source HTML of the links on the vBulletin page. In my experience they are decoded correctly by newsreaders or when used as an anchor href, but not if typed directly into a browser address bar. The links in your example feed work fine in my newsreader (SharpReader). I agree it would be useful to specify which link to use - that has been requested a couple of times. I'll add it to the To Do list.
dnl2ba Member	Posted: 14 May 2005 09:43:58 ° Edited by: dnl2ba wotz, thanks for the quick reply. HTML from vBulletin: <a href="showthread.php?s=702094a8b4ab01b21997dc3aa6d8bdab&t=7">aha i linky yuo</a> XML from RSSxl (save to desktop and view in a text editor; don't view in your browser): <link>http://mostlycloudy.net/forum/showthread.php?s=702094a8b4ab01b21997dc3aa6d8bdab&amp;t=7</link> So, it appears the ampersand in the original document's entity reference is in fact being translated to an entity reference, thereby breaking the original entity reference and therefore breaking the URL.