Dealing with HTML encoded characters in feeds

Sometimes when viewing nodes created by FeedAPI there are HTML-encoded characters being displayed as text on the page. For example, see this screenshot:

The titles contains the text " rather than a quotation mark, and & rather than an ampersand.

The problem is that actual ampersand characters are being encoded as &, so we need to translate them back to the true '&' character. To do this, we will use a preprocess function to filter the output of the page before it is rendered. Replace theme with the name of your theme and replace your_content_type with the machine name of the content type you are using for feed items.

function theme_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {
  if ($vars['type'] == 'your_content_type') {
    $vars['title'] = str_replace('&', '&', $vars['title']);
  }
}

This code replaces the string & with an actual & character in the titles of these nodes.

You will need to employ similar code in views that use this content type. Here is an example:

function theme_preprocess_views_view_fields__videos__page(&$vars) {
  $vars['fields']['title']->content = str_replace('&', '&', $vars['fields']['title']->content);
}

Again, replace theme with the name of your theme, and the rest of the function named depends on how you are theming your views. In this case, I am operating on the page display of a view called 'videos'. This will vary depending on your use.