Xarg blog Archive

Mark Pilgrim's new article, Parsing RSS At All Costs, is up at xml.com.

On average, at any given time, about 10% of all RSS feeds are not well-formed XML. Some errors are systemic, due to bugs in publishing software. It took Movable Type a year to properly escape ampersands and entities, and most users are still using old versions or new versions with old buggy templates. Other errors are transient, due to rough edges in authored content that the publishing tools are unable or unwilling to fix on the fly.

I think using a real xml parser and using some regexp's to fix up common problems might be a better approach although Mark's ultra-liberal RSS parser is short enough that maybe it's a moot point.