alexg,

Malformed XML is the bane of RSS. According to Mark Pilgrim about 10% of typical RSS feeds are malformed*, indeed the UK IT publication The Register has usable XML for only a few days in a given month.

You will find a wide range of problems that will cause XML::Parser the core of XML::RSS to explode:

• Data encoded in one format, but declared in another (or in default utf-8).
• Junk before the start XML declaration, the CMS Vignette tends to do this, and it's popular with big companies.
• Badly nested tags, the CMS is sloppy at non-well formness checking, so it comes out and goes into the RSS feed broken.
• Inproperly escaped ampersands and entities are a very common problem too.

In this node "How do I clean RSS feeds to make them usable?", Matts suggested his rssmirror, the guts of which are now included in both XML::RSS and XML::RSS::Tools.

I became so annoyed with bad XML in RSS feeds that I wrote XML::RSS::Tools to deal with the problems I found, which led to brian d foy taking over XML::RSS fixing a lot of it's problems, and with time designing a whole new version.

See also:

• Parsing badly formed RSS or XML

Good Luck!

* Parsing RSS At All Costs

--
ajt