RSS Feed Breakage

Well it seems my RSS feed is still a bit on the broken side. I changed something in the script and now it is having troubles creating it properly.

I don’t know how many out there know the specification for RSS feeds (my feed follows RSS 2.0 Specification) and one thing that I am having troubles with is converting HTML entities to their proper characters so that the RSS validates. Pretty much the character that I have the most problem with is the ampersand (&).  When you use things like   or » and using PHP’s built in function of html_entity_decode()  it has not been parsing them properly and then the xml fails and the feed does not want to work in the various readers.

The script I use is a custom one that reads the 10 most recent blog entries and writes them to an XML file according to the RSS 2.0 Specification. It’s actually pretty straight-forward in the way it works. I have a header and footer variable and then a body variable that loops while it pulls the appropriate records from MySQL.

Below is the code I use in my loop while I pull from MySQL and try to parse though it:

[code]
<?php
while($blog = mysql_fetch_array($query, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
    // Strip HTML tags and convert any special characters
    $description = $blog['body'];
    $description = html_entity_decode($description);
    
    // Modify date to RFC 822 Specification
    $pubDate = date("D, d M Y H:i:s T", strtotime($blog['date_entered']));
   
    // encode URL with - so that it is URL friendly (for Mod_rewrite)
    $url = str_replace(" ", "-", $blog['title']);
   
    // Actual body of the feed. Gets looped though and created for each Blog Entry

    $feed =  "<item>\n
                <title>{$blog['title']}</title>\n
                <description>{$description}</description>\n
                <link>http://www.tingram.ca/blog/{$url}</link>\n
                <pubDate>{$pubDate}</pubDate>\n
                <guid>http://www.tingram.ca/blog/{$url}</guid>\n
                </item>\n\n";
   
    // Write the current Blog Entry to the file
    fwrite($file, $feed);
}
?>
[/code]

Now perhaps it might be an issue with FCKeditor since I use that to insert my blog entries, but  I’ve noticed that FCKeditor will convert the various entities to their more universal standard which is fine, I want it to do that, but when I read it from the MySQL record, PHP is not doing its proper job on decoding it. Perhaps I am using the wrong function?

If anyone out there can look at the above code and tell me an easier or perhaps better way to go about it, I would appreciate it.  Also my formatting does not seem to stay in my RSS feed and the HTML tags seem to be stripped, even though I don’t strip them when I import the data from the database. I would like to have nice looking RSS feeds and not some blog of text like they are now.