making simplepie class resistant to leading whitespace feed issues

[cadeyrn]

Unfortunately it's a common issue with WordPress feeds that they end up having a leading whitespace or a linebreak before the XML header. Thus fetching RSS feeds with SimplePie fails with messages like:

PHP Notice: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: Reserved XML Name at line 2, column 38 in /home/wordpress/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 1446

In order to make the SimplePie class resistant to this error, a simple trim function should be introduced on the raw data before further parsing:

1605c1605,1606
< 		$this->raw_data = $file->body;
---
> 		// whitespace before XML resistance
> 		$this->raw_data = trim($file->body);

[cadeyrn]

patch file for simplepie

[dd32]

@rmccue thoughts?

[cadeyrn]

Hi there, any news on this?

[ssuess]

Will this ever be added to core? It really helps.

[ssuess]

STILL a big problem, and so easy to fix. Why isn't this in core?

[Hareesh Pillai]

Hi, the SimplePie library has been updated in core. Can you confirm if this issue is still observed in the latest version of WordPress?

Note that SImplePie is an external library. We don't usually patch those in WordPress, but instead, request a change upstream and update to a newer version of the library, if it exists.

@cadeyrn @ssuess

[desrosj]

This appears to have been fixed upstream in ​https://github.com/simplepie/simplepie/pull/445.

While that fix has not been merged into core, #36669 will handle that, so I am going to close this one out.