Hebrew support – Illegal Character Encoding

Hi Yigaler,

The error seems to be happening with SimplePie – which is the RSS library that is installed with WordPress. It seems to be hardcoded to UTF-8 characterset. HungryFEED uses the RSS functions that are provided by WordPress.

WordPress includes SimplePie 1.2 as a default, but this is outdated and the latest version of SimplePie is 1.3. It may be possible to update that library in your WordPress installation and it might resolve the characterset bugs…? I’m not 100% sure about that but it’s worth a try.

The file in WordPress is located at: includes/class-simplepie.php

I just noticed that the simplepie site seems to be missing the single download package, but I have a copy of simplepie 1.3-dev. I packaged it up to simplify the process of updating WordPress:

https://verysimple.com/2011/06/18/update-wordpress-simplepie-to-1-3-dev/

Please let me know if you are able to do this on your wordpress installation and, if so, let me know if it fixes the characterset issue. I don’t know all of the changes in 1.3 but I do see that it has some new functions regarding charactersets, so I have a feeling it may fix your issue.

Hi verysimple,

Thanks for your quick reply. I have replaced the class-simplepie.php file with the new one and re-installed the plugin, but it didn’t fix the problem.

If you could advise more, I would be thankful.

Hmm, if you give me the feed url i can see if there is some work-around but unfortunately the source of the error is in SimplePie, the library on which HungryFEED relies, however is not authored by me. It would be great if the simplepie guys would resolve the issue, but as far as I know 1.3-dev is the most recent version of the library.

From previous experience I know that characterset code in PHP can be surprisingly tricky.

Thanks for the link of the article. I’ll read it later.

Here is the link of the feed:
https://rss.nrg.co.il/health/

Thanks for your efforts.

I was mixing up about the link. Forget about it.

One work-around that you can do is use a feed aggregator to deal with the characterset issues, for example:

[hungryfeed url=”https://mix.chimpfeedr.com/91ac3-rss-nrg-co-il-health”%5D

This is using the service https://www.chimpfeedr.com/ as a proxy for the original feed. but it seems to fix the characterset problem for wordpress.

You can also do even more using Yahoo pipes, here is a simple one:

[hungryfeed url=”https://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=61eb2d31f1c74671d99c9e5b7ea498c6″%5D

Thanks a lot for these solutions. Both seem perfect.

I have more more question regarding SimplePie Ver 1.3-Dev.

I am using im my (first) WP site the Suffusion theme.

When I replace the file class-simplepie.php with the new version (1.3-Dev),

the theme’s options are not displayed anymore. Is this version an official one, or should I wait for an official version, before I write to Suffusion support ?

I would say since 1.3 does not solve your original problem and the work-around above does, i would just put the original simplepie library back in place.

OK. Thanks again

Hi verysimple,

The HungryFeed plugin, works perfect with RSS feeds, which are processed by Yahoo Pipes (as you had demonstrated above).

But Yahoo Pipes has also the ability to create an RSS feed out of a series of items on a page (at least, that what I have understood from some articles.

But when I create such a feed, and try to display it thru HungryFeed, I get the following error:
HungryFEED can’t get feed. Don’t be mad at HungryFEED.
SimplePie reported: A feed could not be found at https://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=14da9fa65bd50e0838ff266dd9cef1fc

I’m not sure if this problem is in the scope of this support forum or of your support of HungryFeed plugin, but I’d appreciate it very much, if you could look into it.

It seems that now to use pipes you need to visit that page in your browser and then click the link that says “Get as RSS” which will give you a long URL that you can use with HungryFEED.

It works perfectly ! Thank you very much