What Characters Cannot Be Used In Titles In An XML File?

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What Characters Cannot Be Used In Titles In An XML File?

Forgive me for asking what I feel like should be an easy question to answer on my own. I am Googling and cannot seem to find it anywhere, though I remember reading it at one time. I know that if I type an ampersand (&) in one of my podcast titles that the XML file will not function correctly until I remove the ampersand and replace it with the word "and." I am wondering if this happens with the question mark character (?). I would like to title one of my podcasts as a question, but would like to avoid the hassle ahead of time. What symbols can I not use in titles/summaries in my XML file, and is there a way to use these symbols in titles/summaries without confusing the XML file?

Windows 7

Posted on Dec 21, 2013 8:21 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 21, 2013 8:35 PM in response to FairPointPodcast

XML can be a trickey beast.

It is best when dealing with titles and descriptins to just use - Letters, Numbers, Dashes or Underscores.

You don't ever want to copy out of a word document either - as there are hidden special characters. And never use a "..." in your title or description - as that can break XML feeds as well.

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Answer 2

Dec 21, 2013 8:40 PM in response to Robert Walch

I use commas and quotation marks in every title and they work out fine. I was hoping that maybe common punctuation might work.

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Answer 3

Dec 21, 2013 9:11 PM in response to FairPointPodcast

Each time you publish a new episode - it is best to re-validate it.

http://feedvalidator.org

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Answer 4

Dec 21, 2013 11:19 PM in response to FairPointPodcast

You are fine with question marks, commas, colons and semi colons, underscores, hyphens and exclamation points as long as they are within tage such as 'title' and 'itunes:subtitle'. As you say you must not have an ampersand by itself anywhere because it's used in XML to indicate the start of a code sequence which is then never completed. You can use the code

&

instead, or indeed the workd 'and' of course.

Diacriticals - é, ü etc - are OK as long as you type them directly into the feed or whatever is making it. For more unusual characters see this page:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#commonmistakes

and scroll down to 'Using Named HTML Character Entitities'.

As Robert says, never construct your text in a word processor and copy it in; this way you may embed invisible control codes; and quote marks are likely to be 'smart quotes' ('curtly quotes'). Either of these will wreck your feed completely.

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