RSS specification HTML code inside RSS feed

Question

Is HTML code inside the <description> tag compliant in RSS 2.0?

score 71 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '12 at 04:23

The RSS 2.0 specification says that you can include HTML in the description element so long as you properly encode the markup.

You have two ways to do this:

Convert tags to escaped HTML entities:

<description>this is &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt;</description>

Wrap the description content within a CDATA section:

<description><![CDATA[this is <b>bold</b>]]></description>

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '12 at 04:27

3

You can decode < and > char to html code

< : <

> : >

answered Apr 11 '12 at 04:27

1

You also need to change the ampersand (&) character. – Alexis Wilke Feb 05 '16 at 22:00
And to be safe, the `"` and `'` characters too, in addition to `&`, `<` and `>`. – Flimm Dec 28 '16 at 13:50
This is the complete list (5 predefined entities): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references#Predefined_entities_in_XML – Aaron Blenkush May 03 '19 at 22:52

2 Answers2