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CClements · #1 08-26-2011, 07:24 PM

Hi all,

I configured vb4 to pull RSS feeds from a website and post them to the forum. However, when the bot posts them, the post has question marks and asterisks replacing apostrophes and other punctuation. The formatting looks off and the article is hard to read. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Or is there a way to fix this? Thanks in advance!

CClements · #2 08-28-2011, 10:21 PM

Seems this issue is due to pulling RSS feed from XML sites. When the site has .rss, it works fine, but most of the sites I want to pull from are XML. Anyone know a way to format XML sites properly so question marks and asterisks aren't being inserted throughout the feed when it's posted to the forums?

kh99 · #3 08-28-2011, 11:16 PM

Can you post the feed that's giving you problems (or PM me if you don't want to post it in public)?

CClements · #4 08-30-2011, 04:54 AM

Hi kh99,

This is the feed I'm trying to pull from

http://www.marines.mil/tnsw/_layouts...9-1f50498cee99

It's a news feed from the Marines.mil site. For some reason, when the RSS posts the feed in the forums, it seems like it replaces characters with question marks and asterisks. I'm not really sure why, but if you could help me figure out a way to clean it up and format it correctly, I'd be eternally grateful

kh99 · #5 08-30-2011, 01:03 PM

I see a few '*' in there. This seems to be caused by the "non-breaking space" character (160) being listing in "Blank Character Stripper" under "Censorship Options" in the adminCP. For some strange reason, the characters you list there are replaced with the censoring character '*'. (It seems like it would be a better idea to just use a space, but maybe there's a reason for it being the way it is).

I don't see any '?' in the feed you gave me. Can you maybe point out a specific article?

CClements · #6 08-30-2011, 09:42 PM

Hi kh99,

Of course after I say something, the Marines.mil feed doesn't seem to be doing it right now. Here's one from the NRA that I just started using:

http://www.nraila.org/xml/RSS.aspx

Here's a screenshot of what it's producing. You can see the question marks and asterisks in the feed:

kh99 · #7 08-30-2011, 10:13 PM

OK, sorry I have to ask another question but: how do you get the full article like that? I'm only getting the first sentence or two (which may be why I wasn't seeing the '?'s in the other feed).

CClements · #8 08-30-2011, 10:18 PM

Hi kh99,

I was using these guys to pull the full feed:

http://fulltextrssfeed.com/

I've tried using the straight feed which pulled the first couple sentences, and I've tried using these guys to pull the full article. It's adding the question marks and asterisks on both accounts.

kh99 · #9 08-30-2011, 11:23 PM

Well, after all this I'm not sure I'm going to be able to help, because I don't get any question marks. Like I mentioned above, I can get rid of the '*'s by removing 160 from "Blank Character Stripper" in the "Censorship Options". Do you know if you've changed the character set your site is using? When you created the feed, did you choose anything other than the default options?

CClements · #10 08-31-2011, 01:05 AM

I didn't change anything from the default options for the RSS feed. After I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the ? and * originally, I tried changing to utf-8 for the character set, which is still what I have it set to. I'll try the blank character stripper trick you mentioned. Maybe I can figure something else out.

Thanks for giving me a hand with this kh99! I might not find a solution to this anytime soon, but I can't thank you enough for helping me try to find one

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