API update for special characters

I’ve added some small updates to the ComLuv API so it handles the weird way in which FeedBurner handles special characters saved in post titles.

Don’t be a fancy Nancy!

If you are putting a fancy character in your post titles like a back tick (`) or a fancy quote (“) then feedburner will turn it in some awful special character which is no problem for them or me but, when it gets sent via a JSON string to the browser you’re commenting with, it’ll break it and you’ll either end up with – and … all over the place or worse, it’ll prevent any of your posts from being returned!

Best Practice for Post Titles

Although this code will be able to handle fancy characters from now on, it’s a good idea to try not to use quotes and other fancy characters in your post titles because they will be treated differently by something that uses a different characterset than your blog or they’ll get converted to something that wont be treated right by javascript or other plugins that read your post titles.

The best thing you can do is to treat your post titles like they were being used to save as a files name on your PC. Hyphens (-) are fine, underscores (_) are great! , even spaces ( ) are fine now but, try to steer clear of other punctuation characters and you’ll greatly lessen the chance of breaking things that you send your posts to.