title: How to get rid of weird characters in my RSS feed?
body: <p>I've created a utf8 encoded RSS feed which presents news data drawn from a database. I've set all aspects of my database to utf8 and also saved the text which i have put into the database as utf8 by pasting it into notepad and saving as utf8. So everything should be encoded in utf8 when the RSS feed is presented to the browser, however I am still getting the weird question mark characters for pound signs :( </p>
  
  <p>Here is my RSS feed code (CFML):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;cfsilent&gt;
  &lt;!--- Get News ---&gt;
  &lt;cfinvoke component="com.news" method="getAll" dsn="#Request.App.dsn#"     returnvariable="news" /&gt;
  &lt;/cfsilent&gt;
  &lt;!--- If we have news items ---&gt;
  cfif news.RecordCount GT 0&gt;
  &lt;!--- Serve RSS content-type ---&gt;
  &lt;cfcontent type="application/rss+xml"&gt;
  &lt;!--- Output feed ---&gt;
  &lt;cfcontent reset="true"&gt;&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
  &lt;cfoutput&gt;
  &lt;rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"&gt;
      &lt;channel&gt;
          &lt;title&gt;News RSS Feed&lt;/title&gt;
          &lt;link&gt;#Application.siteRoot#&lt;/link&gt;
          &lt;description&gt;Welcome to the News RSS Feed&lt;/description&gt;
          &lt;lastBuildDate&gt;Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:05:00 GMT&lt;/lastBuildDate&gt;
          &lt;language&gt;en-uk&lt;/language&gt;
          &lt;atom:link href="#Application.siteRoot#news/rss/index.cfm" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /&gt;
  
      &lt;cfloop query="news"&gt;
      &lt;!--- Make data xml compliant ---&gt;
          &lt;cfscript&gt;
          news.headline = replace(news.headline, "&lt;", "&amp;lt;", "ALL");
          news.body = replace(news.body, "&lt;", "&amp;lt;", "ALL");
          news.date = dateformat(news.date, "ddd, dd mmm yyyy");
          news.time = timeformat(news.time, "HH:mm:ss") &amp; " GMT"; 
          &lt;/cfscript&gt;        
      &lt;item&gt;
          &lt;title&gt;#news.headline#&lt;/title&gt;
          &lt;link&gt;#Application.siteRoot#news/index.cfm?id=#news.id#&lt;/link&gt;
          &lt;guid&gt;#Application.siteRoot#news/index.cfm?id=#news.id#&lt;/guid&gt;
          &lt;pubDate&gt;#news.date# #news.time#&lt;/pubDate&gt;
          &lt;description&gt;#news.body#&lt;/description&gt;
      &lt;/item&gt;
      &lt;/cfloop&gt;
      &lt;/channel&gt;
  &lt;/rss&gt;
  &lt;/cfoutput&gt;
  &lt;cfelse&gt;
  &lt;!--- If we have no news items, relocate to news page ---&gt;
  &lt;cflocation url="../news/index.cfm" addtoken="no"&gt;
  &lt;/cfif&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Has anyone any suggestions? I've done loads of research but can't find any answers :(</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance,</p>
  
  <p>Chromis</p>