Hi, I'm writing a quick and dirty RSS feed aggregator and I'm getting very frustrated with one tiny problem. Occasionally the RSS XML docs contain characters which cause XML::Parser to choke.

The XML::Parser error message generated is:
"not well-formed (invalid token) at line 15, column 19, byte 530"

when I look at byte 530 it turns out to be the 'é' in Nescafé. Other exotic characters also cause XML::Parser to stop dead. I've tried the nice_string function from the Unicode man page:

sub nice_string {
join("",
        map { $_ > 255 ? # if wide character...
        sprintf("\\x{%04X}", $_) :  # \x{...}
        chr($_) =~ /[[:cntrl:]]/ ?  # if control character
        sprintf("\\x%02X", $_) :    # \x..
    chr($_)                     # else as themselves
    } unpack("U*", $_[0]));     # unpack Unicode
}

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but this enrages XML::Parser even further and it fails and the first end-of-line character. I'm using LWP::Simple to grab the XML so my script essentially looks like this:

my $rss = new XML::RSS;
eval { $rss->parse(nice_string(get($url))); };

[download]

Can anyone recomend a module/function that will reliably sanitise the string that get() returns, in an encoding suitable for XML::Parser?

PS I've looked at the 'encoding' option for XML::Parser but it doesn't seem to change the result :(

In reply to XML::RSS by alexg

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