How to add line breaks in RSS feeds?

Question

I'm building my own custom RSS feed in PHP. I want the tag to contain line breaks to make the text more readable. However, I can't seem to figure out how to do it correctly. No matter what I try some RSS reader interprets it incorrectly. Is there some standard best way to add a line-break in and RSS 2.0 feed?

I have tried "\n", which works in NetNewsWire on the Mac, but gets ignored by the built-in Safari browser's RSS reader.

I have tried <br />, which works in the Safari RSS reader, but results in all the text after the
being cut off in NetNewsWire.

Answer 1

By default, readers will try and parse your data unless you tell them not to. To have them skip over it and present it as you intend, you have to declare a CDATA section in the RSS.

If the raw data already has newlines, then you should also be able to just use the nl2br() function to add in the <br /> like so:

echo '<description><![CDATA[ ' .nl2br($desc_data). ' ]]></description>';

If you don't declare the CDATA section, the RSS readers will see any HTML tags you might have as part of the actual RSS and expect an actual node or element of the RSS feed.