Special characters not converting to XML

Product: RSS DreamFeeder(RDF)
Version: 2.0.9
Dreamwever Version: 8
Reported On: 2007-03-08 10:52:59
Reported By: Colin
Confirmed: Yes
Votes: 1

Problem: I have several documents that use special characters in the HTML code. For example — and " .

These characters are being converted to unreadable characters when the RSS file is created. — gets converted to — for example. When I use these feeds to populate my pages my browser can't interpret them and they end up displaying like — or ’ .

Please see http://www.health.harvard.edu/indexFEED.htm

Thanks for any thoughts you may have to correct this.

Colin

Solution:As far as I can tell, the RSS feed is generated properly. The RSS feed uses UTF-8 as it's character encoding. However, the page you are displaying the feed in does not have a character encoding specified. That means that the browser will use whatever the default encoding is (usually ISO Latin 1/ISO-8859-1). This mismatch is causing your character rendering problem in your layout.

You can see the effect of changing the character encoding by opening your page in Firefox. Go to the View menu and under Character Encoding select Unicode (UTF-8).
This will re-render the page using the UTF-8 character encoding setting. You will notice that your page is now displaying the missing characters properly.

Change the setting for the page in Dreamweaver or by adding the codes manually to your document to tell the browsers to use UTF-8 for your encoding.

In DW8 open your page and then select
Modify menu > Page Properties
Select Title/Encoding from the Categories list
Select Unicode from the Encodings popup

Or add this by hand to the head section of your document
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

.