What are the potential causes for special characters not displaying correctly in different parts of an RSS feed, such as the item title and description?

Special characters may not display correctly in an RSS feed due to encoding issues. To solve this problem, make sure that the XML encoding for the feed is set to UTF-8. Additionally, use PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() to encode special characters in the item title and description before adding them to the feed. 

// Set the XML encoding to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8');

// Encode special characters in the item title and description
$item_title = htmlspecialchars($item_title, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
$item_description = htmlspecialchars($item_description, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Add the encoded title and description to the feed
echo '<item>';
echo '<title>' . $item_title . '</title>';
echo '<description>' . $item_description . '</description>';
echo '</item>';

Keywords

RSS feed special characters encoding PHP display issue

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