How is this RSS link encoded?

Question

I'm working with Simplepie to create a simple RSS aggregator. I've come across this feed (http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/linksets/opinions/george-will) that I want to add into my aggregator. For the life of me I can't figure out how the links are encoded (eg: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/c/34656/f/636588/s/25e84385/l/0L0Swashingtonpost0N0Copinions0Cgeorge0Ewill0Edigesting0Ethe0Etwinkies0Elessons0C20A120C110C230Cbbd63dd40E34160E11e20E9cfa0Ee41bac90A6cc90Istory0Bhtml0Dwprss0Frss0Igeorge0Ewill/story01.htm).

This only recently broke when the Washington Post seemingly moved to MediaFed as their RSS provider. So I'm wondering if it's a MediaFed thing or an RSS standard thing.

With Simplepie, I simply do the following:

$link = $item->get_link();

Nothing in the documentation seems to have anything of value.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers!

Answer 1

This is a bug. I have reported it to WaPo every way imaginable, and I get no response.

As to your question about the encoding, it's url encoding gone awry -- looks double-encoded, to me, but also may have other "santitation" applied.

Super annoying.

You can, however, use the guid, which contains the correct link. ;-)