UTF-8 feeds problem

[laacz]

Hello,

>From time to time Feedburner's generated pages contain question marks instead of normal letters (non ascii ones). The common thing to those feeds is that even if using FeedFlare or whatever it is called (when links are though FeedBurner), links to those posts are to original site.

For example, under following link you can find post titles and their links (latest 30 different entries fetched from FeedBurner). These are automatically fetched from feedburner - http://laacz.lv/f/img/feedburner-laacz-lv-error.png.

Feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/laacz

To be clear on that this is not my application's problem, users are reporting that this happens even in Google Reader.

[whale]

Hi,

Your FeedBurner feed doesn't contain the question marks currently and I can't them in Google Reader.

>From your image, all links start from http://feeds.feedburner.com/ do not have any unusual question marks.

Does the error occur in the original feed?

[laacz]

This happens infrequently, and when people notice it (I have about 950 subscribers and some of them notify me) happening in their aggregators (be it Google Reader, Feeddemon, Sage, Netvibes or anything else), it usually is already to late to notice that on feedburner page :(

[whale]

I've subscribed to your feed in my Google Reader. I will try to find out the cause if I see the question marks.

[laacz]

Thank you! I would not bother if there were problems with my feed or only feeds from sites on my server. But, since I've noticed this with other subscriptions, I started this thread.

[whale]

Hey,

I am seeing question marks in Google Reader but I can't reproduce the issue in the FeedBurner feed at the moment. I will subscribe your feed with Windows RSS Platform, which will update your feed every 15 minutes.

[whale]

I do want to have any info on this issue, but unfortunately I can't... the error is fixed automatically very quickly.

[laacz]

So, does that meen this error cannot be fixed or at least localised?

[whale]

I've forwarded this thread to the FeedBurner Team. Let's see if they have any solution.

[matt]

I've sought some advice on this one from the engineering team, but I don't have any details yet. More to come.

[laacz]

Hi! Just checked and got this failure.

I retreived (Jan 30 12:08:34 +0300) feed from http://feeds.feedburner.com/laacz . It returned this XML file: http://laacz.lv/tmp/laaczlv-feedburner.xml , which seams to be not feedburner's generated feed, but original one (though for unknown reason all utf-8 symbols are replaced with ??). Feed uses all fedburner's features to collect stats, so even links should go through feedburner.

Next retrieval of feed (Jan 30 12:13:09 +0300) returned correct XML file.

[matt]

Thanks for "capturing" that example; I don't see the mis-encoded characters in your feed right now (as you would expect). I'll ping the engineers on this one again.

[matt]

All I've been able to confirm is that the 'flash' mis-encoding that occurs can be due to the original source feed being invalid in some way. I don't have any specifics beyond that (or any suggestions for new settings to avoid this issue, other than to confirm everything's a-ok in your source feed).

[Leo]

Is there some new information on this problem?

I still see it on my own feed (from a utf-8 encoded typepad blog) from
time to time and several other feeds, that are all using feedburner.

my source feed validates just fine, the typepad-support has no idea
what the problem could be.

this is one hell of an annoying issue and I would be very glad about
some help or tips how to avoid this.

[Franklin Tse [Community Expert]]

Hi Leo,

Are you laacz? If not, would you post your FeedBurner feed URL here?

[Leo]

No, I am not laacz, but I seem to have exactly the same problem.

My Feedbuner URL is:
ttp://feeds.feedburner.com/fsck

I also saw the issue recently on several other feeds, for example on

http://typepad.com/resources/index.rdf
screenshot:
http://tinyurl.com/yvuomv

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fontblog

[Franklin Tse [Community Expert]]

I cannot see the problem currently. I suggest you validating the
original feed using the Feed Validator (http://www.feedvalidator.org/)
when you see the encoding error.

[Leo]

I just did and the feed validates just fine after showing ??? instead
of umlauts.

I would really love to see a solution to this problem, this affects a
lot of feeds and no one seems to have the slightest idea what (and
where) the problem could be.

[Matt S.]

Unfortunately, this remains an issue we can't reliably reproduce. (I'm
not seeing it the feeds.feedburner.com/fsck feed at the moment, for
example.) FeedBurner _should_ always preserve the encoding and
character literals found in the source feed providing them. If there's
a "flash" appearance of ??? or other incorrect characters, I would
recommend immediately checking the source to see if they're found in
there as well. If they are not, try Troubleshootize > Resync to
immediately bring the FeedBurner feed back up-to-date with the
corrected character(s).