A client asked for me to put together a page on his website that would collect info off of his RSS feed and populate a page that could be viewable by a handheld device. I decided to use a great tool called Magpie RSS to do the job but I encountered an issue with it not displaying certain characters properly.

When I first used Magpie RSS to parse the feed, some code came back displaying like this:

first

Instead of like this:

second

The solution was simple. Before you first call the Magpie RSS parser with PHP using the following code:

require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

you need to add:

define('MAGPIE_INPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');
define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

That will display every foreign character the way it should be displayed.