Using special characters in podcast titles and episode titles

Question

Using special characters in podcast titles and episode titles

I'm fairly new to podcasting (this is my first), and have a question about encoding for Spanish language characters. The podcast is for a 5th grade Spanish class at the school where I work, and needless to say, the titles of some of the episodes have characters such as what I sadly still term 'the upside down question mark and exclamation mark' (can you tell I studied a non-Romance language?) as well as accent marks over several letters.

Could someone a) show an example of how to encode the whole RSS feed (is the 'UTF-8' I currently use enough?). and b) explain which special character codes to use (I believe XML is different from HTML)? If it helps to know, I use BBEdit Lite to write the feed.

Thanks in advance.

Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Mar 15, 2006 5:13 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 16, 2006 10:31 AM in response to Jason_Stone_SFDS

Ah ha. In case anyone else faces this issue, I thought I'd post what I figured out this morning.

My original RSS feed was created in BBEdit Lite, and even though the xml code itself had a UTF-8 line at its beginning, it apparently wasn't really encoded UTF-8. I opened the feed code in Dreamweaver and used its 'Modify -> Page Properties' option to set the encoding to UTF-8. Once I did that, I could use the Mac keyboard combos of Option-1, Shift-Option-?, etc., to create the Spanish characters. The feed validated just fine and showed up in the iTunes directory with correct Spanish grammar.

Nice to actually figure out the supposedly simple things....

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