RSS Validator

UnicodeError: decoding error, invalid data

Your feed contains an invalid character.

A common cause of this error is having a high-bit character (such as a curly quote or curly apostrophe) in your RSS feed. This can happen if you copy-and-paste a quote from another page that contains curly quotes. For maximum compatibility with readers, you should remove the invalid character or use a numeric entity equivalent.

You can also try changing your character encoding to a more liberal encoding. For example, if you have this at the top of your feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Try changing it to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

This can be a difficult error to diagnose, because the validator can not give you the exact location of the error. (This is due to a limitation of our parsing library; sorry, we tried very hard to work around it!) For example, if the validator says the error occurred at the end of a description element, the actual invalid character could be anywhere within the description.

You might be able to find help in one of these fine resources.