Wordpress.com Feeds Displays "Array" Instead of the Description

[bmango]

Hi there,

Apologies if this is not the right place to put this comment.

I was using your excellent service to embed a feed from wordpress.com. It was working great, however, recently it stopped working and instead of showing the description for an item it displays the word "array". It is doing this for all wordpress.com feeds. I have validated the feed as well.

Ben

[gnarlyskigirl]

I have had this problem as well.

Last month this happened with my original feed display from wordpress.com (using Feedroll). I researched, read and understood about the archiving of the code, moving to Github. I implemented the new feed2js code and it displayed great for a couple weeks. Now it displays "Array" in the item description.

Thank you so much for your efforts to keep Feed2js going! And thanks in advance for any advice you can provide about the "Array" text displaying.

Cindy

[gnarlyskigirl]

Ben,
I installed a copy of the feed2js engine on my site and it works great!
The installation instructions on the main page for feed2js are dead-on and simple (if I can do it...). After you upload the directory (as is), navigate to the build.php page on your site. You'll be delighted to see the feed2js creation page we know and love. Enter your blogfeed url and away you go!

Once it's working, be sure to follow through with the rest of the instructions: limit the use of your engine to your own domain. Once you do this, you won't be able to use the build.php page anymore, and others will be kept out.Your feeds, however, will continue to use it flawlessly :) I used .htaccess file restriction method.

I tried to figure out a way to allow several urls to utilize the engine this way - no solution yet. It's all or one, I think.

Hope this helps - happy implementing!!

Cindy

[cogdog]

Thanks for noticing this- confirmed. I need to see what is different in the wordpress.com feeds. Returning an array likely means the parser sees two values for the description.

[gnarlyskigirl]

Thanks for your response, cogdog. Looking forward to hearing your results when you have time :)

[cogdog]

So far I am stumped. I have been comparing and running diffs between my wordpress.com feeds and ones from self hosted wordpress, both RSS 2.0 feeds.

I use a debugging script that comes with Magpie, the RSS parser that Feed2JS uses to extract the content from feeds - this takes a feed and shows what variables te parser puts the feed elements into

http://feed2js.org/magpie_debug.php

What I can see is the content of a feed item, which on a self hosted Wordpress site feed is correctly parsed into item->['content']['encoded'] is tripped up on Wordpress.com that what should be an array element for ['encoded'] is just coming in as a string.... but I cannot figure out (yet) why.

[bmango]

I would like to help but my coding skills are quite basic.Would anyone at WordPress.com be able to help?

[cogdog]

Thank, but I really cannot bring an issue to Wordpress.com until I find out whats triggering it. Their feeds validate, so it is some subtle issue un how Magpie works. The closest I have seen are some subtle differences in how Wordpress.com feeds encode entities like quotes

[bmango]

A long time ago I remember I did parse an XML feed in classic ASP using MSXML, and I remember it was very tricky. It always seems like there is plenty to go wrong in XML feeds. But I don't think that experience will be of much use here.

[axelseaa]

FWIW this issue only appears to happy on feed2js.org .. I tried this on a few installs I have of the latest source and the wordpress.com feed works as expected

[bateller]

@alexseaa I'll make sure to update feed2js.org to make sure its using the latest source.