I am unable to get any of my local SilverStripe RSS feeds to display properly in any browser because the HTML tags are being escaped.

Here is the markup from RSSFeed.ss:

<description>$Description.AbsoluteLinks.EscapeXML</description>

Why is this? I can't think of any reason I would want < and > to display as &lt; and &gt; in a browser. But when I just use $Description.XML I get parsing errors. So my workaround was to use $Description.FirstParagraph(html) but then I can't figure a way to use this with AbsoluteLinks -- which I need in order for images to show up in the feed. Can someone explain to me why we are escaping tags in this template? I just want the HTML from the content to display in the feed. Why wouldn't I??

Thanks in advance,
Garrett

I ended up adding a function to strip invalid XML:

/**
	 * Return the value of the field with relative links converted to absolute urls.
	 * @return string
	 */
	function AbsoluteLinks() {
		$val = $this->StripInvalidXml($this->value);
		return HTTP::absoluteURLs($val);
	}

/**
	 * Removes invalid XML
	 *
	 * @access public
	 * @param string $value
	 * @return string
	 */
	function StripInvalidXml($value)
	{
	    $ret = "";
	    $current;
	    if (empty($value)) 
	    {
	        return $ret;
	    }
	 
	    $length = strlen($value);
	    for ($i=0; $i < $length; $i++)
	    {
	        $current = ord($value{$i});
	        if (($current == 0x9) ||
	            ($current == 0xA) ||
	            ($current == 0xD) ||
	            (($current >= 0x20) && ($current <= 0xD7FF)) ||
	            (($current >= 0xE000) && ($current <= 0xFFFD)) ||
	            (($current >= 0x10000) && ($current <= 0x10FFFF)))
	        {
	            $ret .= chr($current);
	        }
	        else
	        {
	            $ret .= " ";
	        }
	    }
	    return $ret;
	}

//Garrett

That is in sapphire/core/model/Text.php.

I am having this same problem, and just figured out a fix for it:

remove .EscapeXML in line 13 of sapphire/templates/RSSFeed.ss from :

<% if Description %><description>$Description.AbsoluteLinks.EscapeXML</description><% end_if %>

and add HTML in line 278 of sapphire/api/RSSFeed.php:

return $this->rssField($this->descriptionField, 'HTMLText');

Hopefully this helps someone else.

Hey thanks @phawley this helped a lot