Unparsed Character Data and RSS feeds

I just thought I would tell you about a useful XML element that helped me resolve an RSS feed issue I had.

Essentially my RSS feed was generating errors relating to special characters. I didn't know this but It turns out that XML readers hate characters such as & and >.

I tried lots of things to fix the problem including php's html_entities() function. But none seemed to work.

Eventually though I stumbled across w3schools' tutorial on CDATA. And this fixed my problem straight away. And all it does is tell XML readers not to parse the data contained within the CDATA tags. That is, force the reader to display the text content as is.

This is really easy to implement. So if you're having problems with RSS feeds I strongly advise you go and read w3schools' tutorial on it.

I hope this helps. And please let me know if you have any better solutions.