[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Post Titles Appear with HTML Character Codes instead of Characters

I am having the same issue with ampersands on my sidebar widget. Some posts with an ampersand print correctly and others print & amp; (I put the space in for the forum) in the title. Also saw this with one post that had an apostrophe in the title it printed & raquo; in the title instead of the apostrophe. Looking at the html code there is an extra ampersand in front of all of the entities. I am using WP 3.0 and WPP 2.1.4. Any help would be appreciated. You can view both sites that I use this on and see what I am talking about…

https://www.slicksno.com
https://downsouthhiphop.com

Hi guys,

Please download WordPress Popular Posts 2.1.5 beta here and let me know if the HTML characters issue is solved.

WPP 2.1.5 beta solved the HTML characters issue for me. Thanx!

The beta worked for me as well. Thank you!

Thank you, it fixed the problem for me as well. (WP 3.0.1)

Hello,

it is works but not for the titles. Text showing as “text” but title is still &quote;text&quote;.

I love this plugin, but I’m also having the problem with characters showing up in my post titles. Really annoying and I can’t find a way around it. The link to the beta version is no longer working. =(

I figured out a fix quite by accident. I simply edited the title of the post that was appearing with strange characters and saved the changes – meaning if there were html characters appearing where an apostrophe should be, I opened the post in the WordPress editor, deleted the apostrophe, put in a new one, and clicked the Update button. It now appears in this widget without the offending characters. Ta da!! =)

I was having a similar issue and found that the culprit was on line 132 of the plugin file wordpress-popular-posts.php . The title is missing the htmlspecialchars_decode() function. Replace line 132 with the following:

echo htmlspecialchars_decode($instance['markup']['title-start'], ENT_QUOTES) . htmlspecialchars_decode($instance['title'], ENT_QUOTES) . htmlspecialchars_decode($instance['markup']['title-end'], ENT_QUOTES);

That should help with the special characters issues. Good luck!