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I need to include HTML code into my RSS feed. I use Java ROME RSS library:

SyndFeed feed = new SyndFeedImpl();
feed.setFeedType("rss_2.0");

feed.setTitle("Title");
feed.setLink("example.com");
feed.setDescription("Description");

List<SyndEntry> entries = new ArrayList<>();

SyndEntryImpl entry = new SyndEntryImpl();
entry.setTitle("Name");

SyndContent syndContent = new SyndContentImpl();
syndContent.setType("text/html");
syndContent.setValue("<p>Hello, World !</p>");

entry.setDescription(syndContent);

entries.add(entry);

feed.setEntries(entries);

Writer writer = new FileWriter("rss.xml");
SyndFeedOutput output = new SyndFeedOutput();
output.output(feed, writer);
writer.close();

but the output XML contains encoded description:

<description>&lt;p&gt;Hello, World !&lt;/p&gt;</description>

How to properly include unencoded HTML code with ROME?

Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov
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alexanoid
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1 Answers1

2

Analysis

According to the RSS Best Practices Profile: 4.1.1.20.4 description:

The description must be suitable for presentation as HTML. HTML markup must be encoded as character data either by employing the HTML entities &lt; ("<") and &gt; (">") or a CDATA section.

Therefore, the current output is correct.

CDATA encoding

If it is desirable to have CDATA section (CDATA encoding), the following piece of code may be used:

final List<String> contents = new ArrayList<>();
contents.add("<p>HTML content is here!</p>");

final ContentModule module = new ContentModuleImpl();
module.setEncodeds(contents);

entry.getModules().add(module);

Additional references

  1. RSS Best Practices Profile.
  2. Putting content:encoded in RSS feed using ROME - Stack Overflow.
  3. Re: CDATA Support - Mark Woodman - net.java.dev.rome.dev - MarkMail.
  4. rome-modules/ContentModuleImplTest.java at master · rometools/rome-modules · GitHub.

description versus content:encoded

Should I use both - description and content:encoded nodes or only one of them in my RSS feed item ?

And how about the following?

An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples), <…>

According to the RSS 2.0 specification, using the description element is enough: exactly as you have quoted. Here are the examples: Encoding & item-level descriptions (RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law).

For additional details please refer to the question: Difference between description and content:encoded tags in RSS2 - Stack Overflow.

Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov
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    Thanks for your answer. Should I use both - description and content:encoded nodes or only one of them in my RSS feed item ? – alexanoid Jan 27 '18 at 06:45
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    And how about the following: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt - `An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples)` ? – alexanoid Jan 27 '18 at 06:57
  • @alexanoid, thank you for the questions! Please see the updated answer. – Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov Jan 27 '18 at 17:33
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    is there any chance with ROME library in include CDATA section into description field? If so, could you please also show an example. – alexanoid Jan 28 '18 at 06:45
  • @alexanoid, have you tried the example provided in the «CDATA encoding» section of the answer? – Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov Jan 28 '18 at 13:37
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    Yes, it is adding new node with the name `` to the output RSS XML, but I'm interested to have CDATA exactly in the `` node – alexanoid Jan 28 '18 at 14:58
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    @alexanoid, right. I can only share these references with you: [the comment on CDATA sections being escaped · Issue #280 · rometools/rome · GitHub](https://github.com/rometools/rome/issues/280#issuecomment-276796534) and [Putting content:encoded in RSS feed using ROME - Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9887432/putting-contentencoded-in-rss-feed-using-rome). – Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov Jan 28 '18 at 15:42
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    @alexanoid, you are welcome! Hope, that information has helped. – Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov Jan 28 '18 at 16:16