RSS not well formed, problem with =?

[bladx]

hi everyone,

i've been having a problem with my PHP-generated RSS file.. it has this error:

<title>title</title><link>[url]http://localhost/mi/modules.php?mod=story&cat=1&sid=1[/url]</link>

am i not able to have links that have an = in them in an RSS file?

thanks for any input

here is a snippet of the RSS file:

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Mi - A Simple Content Management System</title>
<link>[url]http://localhost/mi[/url]</link>
<description>This is where the site description goes.</description>
<managingEditor>[e-mail]</managingEditor>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2004</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>now</lastBuildDate>
<generator>Mi</generator>
<webMaster>[e-mail]</webMaster>
<item>
<title>title</title><link>[url]http://localhost/mi/modules.php?mod=story&cat=1&sid=1[/url]</link>
<description>this is where we post happy stuff about the story</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

[PHPdev]

One solution would be to use the Base64 reversable encryption functions in PHP to encrypt all your GET variables into one long string, widing up with URLs that look like

http://localhost/mi/modules.php?AxdsfIDLDCcdND5883LSSJHSO

You will need to then write a decrypting function that will turn the encryption back into variables that you can use.

Here is the copy of my Decription Function

function decrypt($string)
{
	$vars = base64_decode($string);

$split = split("&",$vars);

foreach ($split as $key) {
	$split2 = split("=",$key);
	$output[$split2[0]] = $split2[1];
}

return($output);
}

basically takes in a base64 encoded string URL variables and returns an array indexed by the variables original name.

I have never used this technique for RSS, but I do use it to keep the average use from messing with GET variables.

Hope this helps.

PHPdev

[yelvington]

Nothing wrong with = in links.

What validator is complaining? Are you sure the problem is on the line containing the link URL?

[MarkR]

If you posted the raw XML above, that is wrong.

& should be replaced by its XML entity (ampersand a m p semicolon), which I cannot type literally in here because BBcode screws it up.

= is fine.

Use htmlspecialchars() - this works for XML too.

Once again my suspicions are correct, most people who work with RSS have no idea how to create well-formed XML

Be sure that the encoding of your XML file is the same as the encoding you are outputting in.

Mark