Squares instead of quotes, apostrophes in RSS

What version of WordPress are you using?

What do you have “Encoding for pages and feeds” set to in Options/Reading?

Are you writing the posts (or content for your posts) in an external application before publishing them?

Are you copying the posts (or content for your posts) from an external source before publishing them?

Thanks for the reply, macmanx!

What version of WordPress are you using?
1) Currently running 2.0, but I had the problem with 1.5 as well.

What do you have “Encoding for pages and feeds” set to in Options/Reading?
2) UTF-8

Are you writing the posts (or content for your posts) in an external application before publishing them?
3) Nope, just using the standard write page.

Are you copying the posts (or content for your posts) from an external source before publishing them?
4) For quotes, yes, however, manually typing in the characters produces the same results.

Hm, I took a quick glance at juvenall.com and I don’t see the problem that you’re referring to. Could you post a link to an example?

Yeah, like I said in my first post, the problem isn’t with the page rendering (unless you use Konqueror). So when you view the site, it looks just fine. However, load it in some RSS readers (such as Attensa) or copy and paste some of the text into a messenger like Trillian (shows up fine for you, but the recipient will see the missing glyph) and it’s a totally different story.

I’ve tried changing the character type to ISO-8859-1 as well as editing the database (via phpMyAdmin) with no luck.

I just checked your feed in RSSOwl and I don’t see any problem with it. Also, with the exception of one relative URL reference, your feed is valid:

https://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A//www.juvenall.com/feed/

For what it’s worth, I subscribe to a number of services and use different newsreaders to look at how my feed and the excerpt look to others. It’s interesting how it gets rendered differently, particularly when it comes to special characters. In my particular case I like to inlude a “bullet” in the middle of the titles of my posts and have had to play around with trying to write it just once in WP and get it to render the same everywhere else. I started checking because of the bullet but I see it with all special characters and sometimes with “smart” characters (quotes, apostrophes, and dashes that are converted on the fly).

This is just a long-winded way of saying that it’s not a WP thing and what I’ve done is to recommend to visitors specific browsers/newsreaders/services that I’ve tested and know render everything correctly. There’s only so much tweaking one can do to satisfy the greatest number of formats.

This speaks directly to my favorite ironic geek mantra: “The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” As “standard” and uniform as the ‘Net should be, there are still many options being selected that aren’t in our control, particularly when it comes to rendering non-alphanumeric text.

Hope this helps.

My normal RSS reader also produces things correctly, but many of my users have different tastes..lol. So I can’t exactly get them all to switch. Besides, WordPress installs seem to be the only blogs with this issue. It’s not just some, either. Every single install from ThinkProgress.org to the WP developer blog all do the same thing.

In case it’s useful to anyone, here’s a screenshot of the error on my blog in Konqueror: https://img367.imageshack.us/img367/6567/konqueror5ni.gif

Thanks for chiming in, Servant. ??

I watch 30 different blogs and another 30 news sites in my normal reader. This covers everything from MT to simblog and even a few custom systems. The only feeds that seem to show up with this problem are WP installs and it’s only the two (four really) characters that should be standard. This leads me to believe that somehow, WP is doing something totally different in this respect. So I’m trying to figure that out and eliminate it.

Normally, this isn’t an issue I would concern myself with. However, because I work on other open-source projects, I get quite the disproportionate number of fringe users. Lots of Linux, lots of smaller unknown applications. So when more than a handful of them start complaining about things, I’ve gotta hop..lol

If someone comes up with a solution, please, please, PLEASE share with the rest of us. ??

Well, it looks like someone has put together a solution in plugin format.

https://www.sparanoid.com/blog/2006/01/10/quotmarks-replacer/

So far, it seems to be doing the trick perfectly.

The file for download at the above link has a “7z” extension. Am I supposed to save it with another ending? Sorry for being too stupid to be able to read/use it. ??