How to fix XML Parsing Error in WordPress

If you’re running WordPress on your blog or website you must have encountered XML Parsing Errors for sure. Usually those errors are caused by CR (Carriage Return characters) or Space chars in your PHP WordPress files. The aforementioned chars were inserted when files were copied through FTP or when you edited them with a bad Text Editor (ex: Notepad) or someone inserted them from mistake. To fix this problem there are two options:

Typical XML Parsing Error

Manual fix for XML Parsing Error

Check the files mentioned in the error returned by your browser when accessing your blog or just some URLs on your blog and scan that file for spaces or breaks in the mentioned line and column. This is a painful method, as usually the error lies in a page generated from another PHP file. Finding which PHP files generates the page with the error can be hard to do. That’s why I recommend the automatic fix.

Automatic fixing with “Fix RSS Feed” WordPress plugin

The “Fix RSS Feed” WordPress plugin checks the files on your WordPress installation and removes any spaces or breaks it finds in PHP files. If you don’t have enough rights set up on the FTP where your site lies you have to manually change the files, but at least the plugin shows you which files are affected.

The plugin can be downloaded from here. You have to copy it in your Plugins folder, activate it, run the checker and then press the Fix button. It can’t get any easier that this.

I hope this piece of info helped you, as I’m now waiting for my RSS feed to get fixed.

LATER EDIT:

Very important thing, always check that the XML parsing problem is not caused by spaces outside the <?php and ?> delimiters. Check for those spaces in your rss generating PHP files and in your functions.php from your current theme directoy (change the WordPress theme to its default and if the problem persists it not your theme that’s causing the error). For me it was the functions.php that generated the RSS XML parsing error.