Fathom this!

If you have problems with non-UTF-8 characters breaking your feeds in Wordpress (ie. breaking XML parsers), one solution is to attach a filter to the the_excerpt_rss() function and stripping or converting the characters. I’m guessing the errant off-character characters (ahem) are the result of promiscuous copypasting.

1. Grab Jason Judge’s self-contained function for limiting to valid UTF-8 characters (here’s a link to the source).
2. Paste it into your theme’s functions.php file.
3. Also add the following lines:
   
   function the_excerpt_rss_utf8($text) {
return trim(clean_utf8_xml_string($text));
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'the_excerpt_rss_utf8');