Ampersand conversion for RSS feeds

I'm working on a form to create RSS feeds, and have been stymied by the fact that XML does not like the &, which as we all know, is used in many links. The form I'm trying to create is fairly simple, with text fields for all the RSS item tags. This part is fine, it is just when I try to generate that the RSS reader wants to see & otherwise it kindly informs me that a semicolon was expected.

Does anyone have a solution on how to convert '&' to '& amp;' as data is being read into a tpl? I've tried several things without success so far.

Thanks in advance for any help offered, or light shed.

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ISCBorisB

I'm working on a form to create RSS feeds, and have been stymied by the fact that XML does not like the &, which as we all know, is used in many links. The form I'm trying to create is fairly simple, with text fields for all the RSS item tags. This part is fine, it is just when I try to generate that the RSS reader wants to see & otherwise it kindly informs me that a semicolon was expected.

Does anyone have a solution on how to convert '&' to '& amp;' as data is being read into a tpl? I've tried several things without success so far.

Thanks in advance for any help offered, or light shed.

What have you tried? On what Platform/Version? In the traditional Perl presentation template
this is absolutely trivial using regular expressions

Migrateduser

What have you tried? On what Platform/Version? In the traditional Perl presentation template
this is absolutely trivial using regular expressions

TS 6.7.1, and I've tried encoding the URL in several ways, with no success. If it is a trivial solution, what do I need to do?

ISCBorisB

TS 6.7.1, and I've tried encoding the URL in several ways, with no success. If it is a trivial solution, what do I need to do?

Quick and dirty - something like the following to convert $text_item:

$text_item =~ s/&(?!\S+? Smiley Wink

/&/gms;

nipper

you really need to learn perl

Bo showed a simple way to do it, however you will likely find that someone uses other characters that need encoding and using encode_entities would be better.

perldoc HTML::Entities

ISCBorisB

Bo showed a simple way to do it

Should be sufficient to convert RSS-embedded URL Links. I did not want to muddle the water.

HTML::Entities can be a source of subtle problems if one is not sure what it does and how it does it
(just run string "Tom & Jerry" through it twice)

Migrateduser

Thanks to both of you for the help!