Problem reading RSS feeds...

[stma]

So i've got this snippet of code that I use to read articles stored in a folder. It rotates them, and serves up the first xx characters.

The problem I'm running into is that if there is ANY punctuation (, - ' ) in those first xx characters it's throwing up a xml not well formed error.

Any suggestions?

<?
error_reporting(0);
function startElement($parser, $tagName, $attrs) {
        global $insideitem, $tag;
    if ($insideitem) {
        $tag = $tagName;
    } elseif (($tagName == "ITEM") || ($tagName == "IMAGE")) {
        $insideitem = true;
    }
}
function endElement($parser, $tagName) {
        global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link, $iurl, $i, $n;
        if ($i >= $n) {
                return;
        } 
    if ($tagName == "ITEM") {
        printf("<div align=\"left\">");
        printf("<div class=\"rss_title\"><a href=\"$link\">");
        printf("<strong>");
        printf(htmlspecialchars(trim($title)));
        printf("</strong>");
        printf("</a></div>\n");
        printf("<div class=\"rss_desc\">");
        if (strlen ($description) > 0) {
            printf(trim($description));
             }
        printf("</div>\n");
        printf("<br />\n");
        printf("</div>");
        $title = "";
        $description = "";
        $link = "";
        $iurl = "";
        $insideitem = false;
        $i += 1;
    }
}
function characterData($parser, $data) {
        global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link, $iurl;
    if ($insideitem) {
    switch ($tag) {
        case "TITLE":
        $title .= $data;
        break;
        case "DESCRIPTION":
        $description .= $data;
        break;
        case "LINK":
        $link .= $data;
        break;
        case "URL":
        $iurl .= $data;
        break;
    }
    }
}
function parse_feed ($url, $num) {
        global $insideitem, $tag, $title, $description, $link, $iurl, $i, $n;

$insideitem = false;
$tag = "";
$title = "";
$description = "";
$link = "";
$iurl = "";
$i = 0;
$n = $num;

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startElement", "endElement");
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
$fp = fopen($url,"r")
        or die("Error reading RSS data.");
while ($data = fread($fp, 4096)) {
    xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp))
        or die(sprintf("XML error: %s at line %d",
            xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)),
            xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
}
fclose($fp);
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
$i = 0;
}
?>

[zealus]

You may want to take a look at this to sanitize input: http://us3.php.net/htmlentities