Recently we had a problem with our RSS feed appearing strangely on our homepage.  We were using MagpieRSS to read our RSS feed, however apostrophes and other characters appeared scrambled.

After much reading and googling, it turned out that our page wasn’t using UTF-8 as its encoding method – and our feed was.  So the browser got very confused.  To resolve this, ensure the page displaying your RSS feed is encoded as UTF-8 by doing the following:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");

Or in HTML:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">