Special Characters and files

[ids]

I need to figure out if this is acceptable:

 <mvt:assign name="l.settings:feed_description" value="glosub( l.settings:feed_description, '&reg;', '®' )" />

The substitution works. However, when loading the file in a real text editor or browser, there is an extra character and I am having no success finding out why. The replacement REG comes in as:

®

The  is consistent throughout the file for any character I am doing a glosub for. Anyone know why and will it affect data feeds such as Google Shopping?

Thanks,

Scott

[wmgilligan]

I believe it has to do with the encoding.... something like this is needed (don't recall the specifics unfortunately)... <meta charset="utf-8">

[ids]

Thanks Bill.

I did see that sort of solution elsewhere. We're actually not worrying about the browser. This feed file won't be loaded in a browser AFIK. I did make sure my editor loads a file detecting utf-8.

The main concern is the Google shopping feed.

Scott

[alphabet]

Google shopping feed will make a best guess for the character set if it is not declared in the XML tag.

It looks like you are using Unicode ISO-8859-1, so change assignment to:

 <mvt:assign name="l.settings:feed_description" value="glosub( l.settings:feed_description, '&reg;', 'U+00AE' )" />

And on the Google Feed declare:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

// rest of feed