Feed Informer: Forums » Topic: Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed

azdrew on "Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed"

azdrew — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:21:32 +0000

Awesome! Thanks very much.

I just upgraded my account ;-)

admin on "Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed"

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:37:17 +0000

Have a look now and see what you think :)

azdrew on "Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed"

azdrew — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:52:04 +0000

Sure, that would be great - thanks!

admin on "Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed"

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:35:54 +0000

That's interesting. I've never seen that before.

This is caused by our new parser which went into service a couple of weeks ago. We used to use a 'real' XML parser to parse feeds, but since so many feeds are totally wrecked/broken/invalid.. we've had to move to a more liberal system just so we can parse '100%' (or as close to) of feeds.

One thing that was never anticipated in all of this is that multiple CDATA sections would exist within a single section in this way.. so they're not caught and managed as single CDATA sections are. It does appear, however, that as soon as this feature is added, we'll be looking good, since that's the only problem arising in your file.

I'll try to implement an update to the parser tomorrow to deal with multiple CDATA sections and then, if it's okay with you, wipe the contents of that source feed and recrawl it immediately so that you get the correct output. Let me know if this is okay with you.

azdrew on "Problem with CDATA and apostrophe in SMF feed"

azdrew — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 21:29:29 +0000

Hi, I noticed a new problem with one of my feeds this morning, and I'm not sure what's happening.

I have a Feed Digest feed with 3 source feeds. One comes from a Simple Machines Forum (SMF) bulletin board.

The source feed is at

http://www.aplaceofgrace.org/newsfeed_forum

it appears that the feed code for SMF wrappers all text with CDATA tags.

There is a new post with an apostrophe in the text. The source feed closes on CDATA, inserts the numeric code for the apostrophe, and then starts a new CDATA for the rest of the description. The title of the item in the feed is "New Member Sunday" for your reference.

This is getting mangled in the Feed Digest Feed. It looks like Feed Digest strips all of the CDATA, except its doing very strange things with this second one around the apostrophe. I get lots of html lt and gt codes, and a wayward CDATA in the Feed Digest stream. I get an "Invalid EOF" from feedvalidator on the feed.

My Feed Digest feed is here

http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/FMY1LDF52G.rss

Any ideas? This seems like an SMF oddity perhaps (I have a Joomla feed that doesn't split the CDATA like this), but my SMF feed does validate according to feedvalidator.

I've been searching high and low for a good feed merging service, and I really like Feed Digest so far during my trial, so I'm hoping this is something that can get worked out. Thanks