parse posts

I’ve been working on my own site a bit since getting out of school. I’ve been pulling an RSS feed from this blog onto my homepage for a while now, using something based off of this script. I try to keep the markup valid. The feed has given me a bit of troubles for valid markup, mainly with escaping ampersands. One problem was that I was using this function:

function pagFixRSSEncoding($argString){
    return mb_convert_encoding($argString,'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8');
}

which I had gotten from somewhere. I’m not sure what it does, but it seems to do nothing for me. I removed it, though I’ll reinstate it or look for something else if characters other than ampersands give me trouble.

I was also using this function:

function pagFixLinks($argString){
    return str_replace("&", "&", $argString);
}

to fix the ampersands in the “link”. This simply replaces all ampersands with the proper HTML entity in the passed string, works just fine.