Weird characters in RSS feed

[dabb]

I use Yahoo RSS news feeds on many of my sites. However, I recently started encountering weird binary character sequences in the titles and article summaries that appear to be confusing AdSense into serving up japaneese kanji ads, lol. I think I've fixed them all so far, but Google hasn't come back yet to respider the front page after which it will hopefully start serving up non-kanji ads. You can see an example of this on the front page of http://www.diabetesheadlines.com .

Some examples of these character sequences are \xe2\x80\x93 being a long dash, \xe2\x80\x99 being a backwards apostrophe, \xe2\x84\xa2 being the trademark symbol, \xc2\xae being the registered sign, \xc3\xb1 being a squiggly spanish "n", etc.

Is there any table of all of these funky character sequences anywhere, or do I just have to fix them as I encounter them? Has anybody encountered any RSS handling code that translates these sequences into "web safe" characters?

Thanks!

 

[SiKing]

Bit off topic but your ozzie osbourne site contains a typo. (Price instead of Prince in the subheading). It may have been intentional looking at the domain but thought it was worth pointing out.

 

[dabb]

DOH, thanks for pointing that out. I'll fix it tonight.

PS: The domain name is a typo (ozzie vs ozzy) intentionally. It's listed #4 on MSN under Ozzie Osbourne which a lot of people mistakenly search on. It's easy to get a ton of MSN traffic from misspells like this.