Podcast Feed breaking a href tag – fails to validate

  • Resolved Puck

    (@puck)


    5 years, 6 months ago

    Podcast feed hasn’t been updating lately, so client asked me to check it out.

    Feedburner gave me the following notice, but at line 322, also a “description” line. The previous itunes:summary was properly closed, but I noticed that it had an unclosed link (“a href”) immediately before it.

    —-
    The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 2212: The element type “itunes:summary” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “</itunes:summary>”.
    —-

    After trying several other fixes I simply removed the link from that post to see if the error would go away.

    It did, but now the exact same error has occurred after another unclosed link in an itunes:summary.

    “Don’t put in links” isn’t a good long-term solution. Seems fairly obvious the itunes:summary bits should be truncated before the unclosed link tags occur, but I’m pretty sure this is something the plugin developer has to handle?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hello @puck,

    Looking at the code the itunes:summary tag is the content of the $podcast_description variable, which is created from the following function calls

    $podcast_description = mb_substr( strip_tags( $description ), 0, 3999 );

    It is possible your error is created by some oddly formatted html in the post content. Could upload/send us the post content of the podcast in question? Then we could run it through the above function to see what is returned.

    Thread Starter Puck

    (@puck)

    Sure. The feed is available at

    https://moreplatesmoredates.com/feed/podcast

    Feedburner is saying there’s a problem with the itunes:summary on line 304, but that line is a description? There are plenty of other closing itunes:summary lines that have unclosed HTML tags before them.

    Line 2161 (as of now — will move if more podcasts are added) has an unclosed anchor link. There is definitely HTML, and it’s inside a CDATA element, but I now notice the closing double-brackets are misplaced!

    <p>But in reality, Clomid is a SERM commonly used in <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://moreplatesmoredates.com/pct-and-ais-for-sarm-cycles/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-wpel-link="internal">PCT phases</a></span> to recover endocrine function, and Letrozole is a potent <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://moreplatesmoredates.com/aromatase-inhibitor-while-on-steroids/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferr]]" data-wpel-link="internal"></itunes:summary>

    The CDATA seems to be breaking before a data-wpel-link and I’m pretty sure that’s being added by a plugin either my client themselves or a temporary “SEO Expert” (ugh) installed.

    I’ll leave this reply, but then see if removing that plugin fixes this problem.

    Thanks for your time helping!

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by Puck.
    Thread Starter Puck

    (@puck)

    Update:

    I disabled that plugin, re-validated with Feedburner, no problems.

    For future reference, the plugin was WP External Links, which hasn’t been updated in ages.

    Figuring out who installed that.

    @puck Glad we could help you diagnose that issue. Thanks for letting us know of that conflict, and we will make a note of it for our documentation.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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