OAI PMH special characters not rendering

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Rachel Wang

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Apr 22, 2026, 10:11:50 AM (7 days ago) Apr 22

to DSpace Technical Support

Hi Everyone!

We're reaching out to see if others have encountered special character encoding issues in OAI-PMH records. Several institutions we support are seeing malformed metadata in fields like dc.title and dc.description.abstract, where apostrophes appear as ' for example, ABC's University renders as ABC's University.
We've addressed this by applying a custom logic in our etdms.xsl and oai_dc.xsl crosswalk files:

<xsl:template name="fix-apostrophe">
    <xsl:param name="text"/>
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($text, '&amp;apos;')">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '&amp;apos;')"/>
            <xsl:text>'</xsl:text>
            <xsl:call-template name="fix-apostrophe">
                <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, '&amp;apos;')"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>


    <description>		<xsl:call-template name="fix-apostrophe">
			<xsl:with-param name="text" select="."/>
		</xsl:call-template>
	</description>

Since many institutions have their OAI-PMH feeds harvested by third parties this issue has downstream impact. Our team has noticed it's a widespread issue with commonly harvested metadata fields. Has anyone else run into this? And would there be interest in our team submitting this as a Github Issue/PR fix? Thank you Community! Best Regards, Rachel

Shaun donovan

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Apr 24, 2026, 2:50:49 AM (6 days ago) Apr 24

to Rachel Wang, DSpace Technical Support

Hi Rachel.

Yes, we are definitely experiencing the same issue. I have found that a lot of Word special characters are introduced specifically into the "Abstract" field as users simply copy and paste from word into the Abstract field during submission. I have addressed this by adding a JS based replacement script in the submission form, and that seems to be working. I am currently working on another issue where an item is failing on an invalid XML character, but I am struggling to find where in the Metadata this is hiding. I am busy with a script that identifies the actual item that is failing, downloading all of its metadata and scrutinising it for invalid characters, but am not finding it (yet). What I have discovered is that the extracted text from a PDF document contains the "smart quotes" characters, but as far as i am aware this does not get pulled into OAI-PMH.

I am continuing my investigation today and hope to resolve it.

I would certainly appreciate you logging it a s a PR.

Kind Regards.

Shaun

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