It happened several times that an automatically generated RSS feed broke due to the presence of HTML entities. This makes sense since RSS is not HTML but the issue is that it is generated from fragments of HTML articles.
As a simplified example, say we extract the first sentence of an HTML article to generate part of an RSS feed and that sentence contains and é
(é). Now this appears in the RSS feed and therefore the entire feed is no longer valid. Not only does it it fail validation but most readers abort reading the RSS as they do not recover from the failure.
What is the right thing to do when creating RSS from HTML that includes HTML Entities?
There are a few approach that some to mind such as resolving the entity to a charset but would that be universal? Would an RSS in Unicode instead of ASCII work with readers? Or could the HTML entity definition somehow be imported into RSS? Other ideas are welcome. It should not matter but in this case the generated back-end is PHP.