I use the heck out of the RSS Reader application to scan for new posts on about a dozen websites.

Something that is a continued aggravation is that the RSS Reader doesn't handle the encoding like a browser does, so often the headline of the item looks like gibberish due to formating and special characters in the feed item.

Example: the title

Iraqi government: "We will continue until we secure Sadr City"

comes across as:

Iraqi government: "Wewill continue until we secure Sadr City"

Is there any way to make the RSS Reader change encoding so that it is more true to the Browser view and remove all of the special code characters?

This seems an unusual problem; what I'm used to is either a "real" encoding problem (UTF-8 interpreted as Latin1 etc.) or a feed that violates the standards and includes HTML where it shouldn't.

This one is different, the """-part should be correct. Could you point us to the feed? Maybe the & got double-encoded so its actually """... Otherwise it would be a severe bug in the reader.

Hehe, rss reader is a ***** to compile. It took me 1:30 to get sources and to compile a non working applet.

This happens for me with Google News feeds.