Monks,

I'm building a rss feed with Perl. Despite asking people to paste only text, they often copy and paste from Word or other word processors and I end up with bad characters. I have been switching a lot of characters, but inevitably there is a character I don't catch. There seem to be some bullets that I can't catch and it makes the feed choke. Interestingly, if I print the feed to a flat file it can be opened in a browser even with the bad characters, but if I print it dynamically from Perl the browser shows an error. I guess my first question is why would that be?

Here are a few of the characters I'm switching out. How do I find the binary code for these bullets that are pasted into the form so I can escape them? 

            $text =~ s/&//gi;
            $text =~ s/Æ//gi;
            $text =~ s/ì//gi;
            $text =~ s/î//gi;
            $text =~ s/\n//eg; 
            $text =~ s/\r//eg;
            $text =~ s/í/\'/gi;
            $text =~ s/-/ /gi;
            $text =~ s/\x9s/-/gi;
            $text =~ s/\x96/-/gi;
            $text =~ s/\x95/\<li\>/gi;
            $text =~ s/’/'/gi;
            $text =~ s/\?/?/gi;
            $text =~ s/0xa0/ /gi;

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These are the bullets when copied out of the text, but using this code doesn't work: 
             $text =~ s/·//g;
            $text =~ s/o//g;

[download]

In reply to Stripping bad characters in rss by htmanning

Title:
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