Sanitizing RSS input in Rails

Question

Hello,

I'm pulling in the RSS feed from Craigslist into a rails app I'm building. When I try and insert content from the posts into my database, there's plenty of bad characters that cause the database to choke.

I've tried a few different methods (the Sanitize plugin, hpricot, regexing the input) but nothing seems to work right.

I'm still a rails noob so I thought I'd appeal to the community. Any tips on how to handle bum characters in RSS feeds?

Answer 1

Have you tried Nokogiri (Railscasts video)?

Actually Ryan Bates has a screen cast on feed parsing: feed parsing.

Answer 2

I love Feed Normalizer http://feed-normalizer.rubyforge.org/