rss parser: possible character encoding problem

[erwin]

Some rss feeds can't be parsed because of: Content is not allowed in prolog. Although the feed is valid according to feedvalidator.org

It could have something to do with the encoding that is used to read the rss feed.

Example of a feed that goes wrong: http://www.hbvl.be/syndication/service.ashx?src=limburg

[joeri]

This happens because the feed doesn't have the required <?xml version="1.0"?> prolog. One way to work around this is to not let the xml parser read in the url, but to read in the feed manually. Then we can check to see if the prolog is provided or not and add it if needed.

[joeri]

The problem was the BOM (byte order mark) in front of the feed xml. Instead of reading in the xml using a URLConnection and a BufferedReader?, we just pass the url string directly to the xml parser.