Fix EntityRef: expecting ; PHP error when reading public RSS feeds
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Fix EntityRef: expecting ; PHP error when reading public RSS feeds

15 Mar 2023 Fix EntityRef: expecting ; PHP error when reading public RSS feeds

Posted at 16:14h in PHP, RSS by

It is still very common to encounter RSS feeds that have simple XML parsing errors. This usually occurs when the RSS feed is created using a templating system instead of an XML library. The most common error that I’ve seen is a bare ampersand ‘&’ in the title or description. Ampersands are special characters in XML used to denote entities, and ampersands in text must be encoded as the XML entity & for the RSS to be valid.

To fix this, I use the following regular expression:

$rss_string = preg_replace('/&(?!;{6})/', '&',  $rss_string);

This regular expression uses negative lookahead to find any ampersand characters that are NOT followed by a semicolon within six characters. Any ampersands not followed by a semicolon are probably bare ampersands, and they are replaced with the & entity.

Fixing incoming RSS this way is just a workaround. It would be nice if all public RSS feeds were XML compliant, but sadly that’s not the case.

credit: https://www.php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples-errors.php#115708



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