RSS stopped working in 2.2

Feed Validator says the following:

This feed does not validate.
line 1, column 1: XML parsing error: <unknown>:1:1: xml declaration not at start of external entity [help]
01. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

There seems to be a space before ‘<?xml’… but does that really cause the problem? And if so, how to get rid of it?

Delete it out of where? I checked /wp-includes/feed-rss2.php (which is a new file in WP 2.2) but I don’t see anything wrong there.

(this was a reply to a deleted reply…)

That space shows up in your main page as well, so it’s likely to be an extra space at the beginning or end of a plugin, or in your wp-config.php file, or in wp-settings.php, or in index.php, or what have you. Somewhere is an extra space at the beginning or end of a file. Find it. Remove it.

Thanks so much! It turns out that the Theme Preview Plugin caused the problem (although I couldn’t trace the space).

Shucks. I have the exact same Feed Validator error. But I don’t use Theme Preview Plugin, so I don’t know what is causing this for me.

What else might cause this? If it’s an “extra space” Otto talked about, how can I find the bugger?

Sorry
This feed does not validate.

line 1, column 1: XML parsing error: <unknown>:1:1: xml declaration not at start of external entity [help]
           <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
           ^

I just fixed something similar in my 2.3.3 blog. I lostRSS and started seeing this:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: https://www.popularwireless.com/blog1/feed/
Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
^

I compared my wp-config with the sample in the 2.3.3 distribution. I was missing two define statements, these:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

I added these and eliminated two extra spaces at the end of the file. Now I see the feed!

I’m no programmer and do not code in PHP. I just look for differences. On a previous occasion I had added define line to my wp-config for a plug in so I backed out those changes. That had no effect. I noticed the missing lines and added those and all seems to be back.

Now I’m going to see if Windows Live Writer Functionality has returned as well.

Windows Live Writer started working again! Woo hoo!