Issue Parsing Medium RSS Feed – “Undeclared Entity” XML Error

Hi Feedzy Support Team,

We’re experiencing an unexpected issue when fetching a Medium RSS feed using the Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite plugin on our WordPress site. Everything worked normally for several months, but starting on November 21, the feed began returning an XML parsing error.

Here is the full error message from our logs:

“Error while parsing feed URL: invalid XML, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: Undeclared entity error at line 69, column 55.”

It appears the feed now contains undeclared HTML entities (such as  , –, etc.) which cause SimplePie to fail during RSS parsing. This issue only began recently, and we have not changed anything in our plugin configuration or website setup.

What we’ve confirmed so far:

• The issue is reproducible consistently.
• Feedzy previously parsed this same feed successfully for months.
• The error began suddenly on November 21, suggesting something changed in the feed output.
• Manually validating the feed shows XML errors caused by undeclared HTML entities.
• If you visit the feed URL in browser directly, it’s looking normal, as it should.

Could you please advise whether there is a workaround within Feedzy for handling these invalid characters, or if there is a recommended way to sanitize/normalize the feed before parsing?

We would appreciate any guidance or a patch that can help Feedzy handle these feed irregularities more gracefully.

Thank you in advance!

• This topic was modified 6 months, 2 weeks ago by comydev.