RSS Feed Chinese Character Error
Posted in Blog Tips | By AhTim @ May 21st, 2008
My wife’s Pet Blog readers is increasing gradually after 1 month blogging. The highest RSS subscribers hit 20 readers on yesterday. I think this is quite a good progress for a one month plus blog.
Since she know nothing about wordpress and php coding, I am the one who maintain the blog. If you have subscribed to her RSS feed at Dogtist.com, I am sure you have not get the correct feed since 3 weeks ago.
Feed Error with Chinese Character
I have noted the feed error but no time to look into it until today. The problem is all Chinese character turn to question mark “?”. No matter feed client or email feed, all face the same problem.
At first, I thought it was due to the UTF-8 file format problem in one of the plugin. I have changed some characters in the plugin to Chinese word. But somehow, it does not work even I have change it back.
Secondly, I suspect it was due to some new plugin problem. I have disable some plugin and try and error. But result still the same. Finally, I use FeedValidator.org to verify the feed. It shows some “high bit character” error in the post content. The so call “high bit character” is combination of Chinese character and ASCII symbols. I changed all those symbols to UTF-8 characters.
I change one by one until feedvalidator shows RSS feed is OK! Yet the feedburner’s feed still show question mark “?” for all Chinese character. 
Resolve Feed Error for Chinese Character
I trace back the first post that happened question mark symbols. Fortunately, my Google mail has enough space for me to keep all deleted mails in Trash. It was 6 May 2008 when first happened.
I check the post content on 6 May 2008. It looks working well. At last, I noticed there is a miscellaneous code “/>” at the end of Tags. Don’t ask me why but once I remove it, all post feed correctly without the question mark symbol! 
Further more, seems like the “Bookmark this” plugin not working 100% well with Chinese blog. I have changed it to “Share this” plugin. Now, the RSS feed for Dogtist.com is working well without any problem. Hope you enjoy those post there about Pets, especially Dogs!
My two cents
In my opinion, I think this error was come from some font codes when copy directly from Ms Word. Since then, I have to more careful when copy content into blog post. Do not ever copy from Ms Word, better copy from notepad.
Do you face any problem on your feed? How you resolve it? Please comment for me.
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Tags: chinese character, feed error, rss feed
May 21st, 2008 at 11:25 pm
That`s why I avoid to use chinese in my blog. Between, my chinese is not that good actually. LOL.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 am
@Greentac: Sometime we just want to write in our mother language, can’t avoid.