Take the 2-minute tour ×

I am generating an RSS feed using PHP with MySQL and I am getting an issue where the 'Details' field from my database (that containing more text and more special characters than any other field being fetched) had been problematic. I have searched and changed many things, including getting the dB and output to XML matching at UTF-8 character coding.

However, I can see that there are one or two items on my feed that are not fetching the 'Details' text. Here is the feed: http://www.laystar.co.uk/feeds/rssmagazine.php

Scroll down to Crazy Drivers and you can see that the Description field has only limited detail (the words from the dB aren't included).

When users upload articles they include a blurb for their article. It's the blurb that is being fetched. However, where they might enter three dots/periods '...' to form an ellipsis, I can see that in the dB the dots are transformed/converted into one ellipsis character (nothing that my PHP is doing other than strip slashes). If I remove the ellipsis char in the dB, then all is well and the XML outputs correctly - as in the article, A Glimpse of Yorkshire, which was working until I removed the ellipsis char.

This is driving me nuts now, so any help would be much appreciated

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

The reason you cannot use your ellipsis in the xml file is most likely your xml encoding and your ellipsis encoding do not match.

What is the encoding on your database table? Ensure it is set to use utf-8.

For more information: http://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_encoding.asp

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


