Question

I am trying to create an RSS feed that will validate using the W3C validator.
I keep getting problems from the following URLS containing the characters £, ` or -

Here are the URLs:

http://www.example.co.uk/news/2012/april/stamp-rationing-–-why-the-royal-mail-are-ripping-you-off

Here is the error:

This feed does not validate.
line 14, column 119: link must be a full and valid URL: http://www.example.co.uk/news/2012/april/stamp-rationing-–-why-the-royal-mail-are-ripping-you-off [help]
… –-why-the-royal-mail-are-ripping-you-off

I have tried replacing the symbols with escape characters but this doesn’t work. Here are the escape characters I have been using:

 Text = Text.Replace("-", "&#45");
            Text = Text.Replace("£", "%C2%A");
            Text = Text.Replace("`", "%60");
            Text = Text.Replace("’", "%60");  

Does anyone have any idea how to solve this problem? Here are some more links that are causing me problems:

http://www.example.co.uk/news/2012/march/for-sale-3-bed-detached-london-home-£15,000

Error:

This feed does not validate.
line 14, column 106: link must be a full and valid URL: http://www.example.co.uk/news/2012/march/for-sale-3-bed-detached-london-home-£15,000 [help]
… -sale-3-bed-detached-london-home-£15,000

Answer 1

You will need to URL encode the URLs before posting them in the RSS:

var encoded = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(aUrl);

Note that the URLs will not be usable directly as :, / etc will also get encoded.

If you want the values of these to be valid XML, use SecurityElement.Escape instead.

var escaped = SecurityElement.Escape(aUrl);