recode

I strongly recommend adding a schema validator to anything that generates XML. ATOM¹ has a nice schema available² that you can use at the end to check the whole thing (I use xmllint³, since it is in a lot of package repositories). Another nice thing about ATOM compared to RSS is that it has the xml:base attribute, which means you do not need to rewrite relative URLs into absolute ones. You can use recode's⁴ XML-standalone/r0 charset to do the XML escaping correctly. And of course you should be using tidy⁵ to make sure the HTML is correct before putting it into the feed or publishing it on the web. It only takes about 6 lines of shell code using the mentioned tools to generate the ATOM feed for my blog.⁶ ¹ https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt ² https://gist.github.com/tjdett/4617547 ³ http://xmlsoft.org/xmllint.html ⁴ https://github.