Apple's RSS Feed Giving Me Headaches

[l008com]

So my RSS feed parsers all work great, no problems at all EXCEPT on apple's feeds. Punctuation goes all crazy. What should be this:

Introducing iLife '09

Gets read in at this

Introducing iLife ’09

Is there some magic function I need to pass these string through to convert these crazy characters into normal characters?

This is the feed:
http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss

[bradgrafelman]

Well the first thing I notice is this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

So, are you outputting your page in UTF-8 encoding?

Why? Because the RSS feed doesn't say

l008com wrote:

Introducing iLife '09

at all; it actually says:

Apple Hot News wrote:

Introducing iLife ’09

[l008com]

So if I pass the text through htmlentities(), will that turn it into html characters instead of UTF8 characters?

[NogDog]

It probably would be better to just ensure that your resulting web page is UTF-8:

<?php
// before *any* output
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Then only use htmlspecialchars() to filter output (not htmlentities()).

[l008com]

So turns out i was already using htmlentities()

$rsstitle = htmlentities( mysql_real_escape_string($rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["TITLE"]) );

so what if i reverse that, and call htmlentities first, then put that inside mysql-real-escape-string, would that fix things

[NogDog]

I would not use htmlentities() at all for saving text to the database. (1) It does not work well with UTF-8, only with single-byte character sets. (2) It has nothing to do with SQL injection, it should only be used for filtering HTML output to the browser (and if outputting UTF-8 you should only use htmlspecialchars() instead).

This little article I wrote might be of some use: http://www.charles-reace.com/blog/2008/10/03/utf8-in-php-and-mysql/