the Mittineague Blog

There have been changes to the widgets.php file other than it's having been moved from the plugins/widgets folder to the wp-includes folder since I posted the widgets.php hack two years ago. I have discovered a much simpler and easier hack to achieve the same effect. That is, a way to ensure that RSS feeds with a different encoding than the blog's encoding won't cause validation errors.

If you look in the wp-includes/rss.php file you will see the MagpieRSS function. If you make these changes

/* encoding hack */
// $parser = @xml_parser_create();
$output_blog_enc = get_bloginfo('charset');
$parser = @xml_parser_create($output_blog_enc);

xml_parser_create() will use your blog's charset for the output.

The PHP documentation http://www.php.net/xml_parser_create states:

The optional encoding specifies the character encoding for the input/output in PHP 4. Starting from PHP 5, the input encoding is automatically detected, so that the encoding parameter specifies only the output encoding. In PHP 4, the default output encoding is the same as the input charset. If empty string is passed, the parser attempts to identify which encoding the document is encoded in by looking at the heading 3 or 4 bytes. In PHP 5.0.0 and 5.0.1, the default output charset is ISO-8859-1, while in PHP 5.0.2 and upper is UTF-8. The supported encodings are ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 and US-ASCII.

So you may need to add another argument for the input character encoding if you have PHP version 4