hello Le Tartar, I checked your post every now and then, hoping to see someone replying to it and suggesting a solution. Apparently this did not happen (yet) ;-(. I share your problem with RSS feeds that show some crumpled text because of the german umlauts used in it. So, after a while I decided to write a my own RSS reader, starting off from the Sample RSS widget in the Chumby Wiki. I have to admit, I am a flash/actionscript newbie, so I have some learning to do ;-)

What I learned so far: when loading XMLs into flash, nodeValues are parsed as UTF-8 encoded strings by default. But I want to load several german RSS feeds that use ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding, clearly stating so in their header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogChannel="http://www.(...)

So it's not the problem Duane mentions in his post to http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=1953 ("Minor confusions with net radio display") where the encoded text does not fit to the encoding in the XML header node ....

Up to now I could not find out how to tell flash to parse ISO-8859-1 encoded strings properly, or how I could re-encode ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 using Actionscript. I searched the web, there are several comments about embedding fonts and Latin-1 glyphs, but this did not solve the problem for me. I even tried to use AS3 ByteArrays with method readMultiByte for string conversion, but that didn't work either (no AS3 on the Chumby?). I cannot believe that there is no simple solution for this?!? Maybe some flash guru reading this and finding some time to enlighten my way ... ?-))

Many thx in advance!

PS: I understand that the Chumby did not officially hit the road outside of the US, so I don't blame Widget authors forgetting about foreign character sets or internationalization. However, this might be one of the (minor) issues our beloved Chumby will face, once sold all around the world ...

There's a solution to pass the feed through Yahoo! Pipes, but it's less than perfect.

gingerbeardmen (btw: I like your nick ^^), I played around with Yahoo pipes some weeks ago, it's a nice playground (though I did not try to solve my "Umlaut" problem with it). Using Yahoo pipes seems to be unnecessarily complicated, there should be an easy way to parse a ISO-8859 encoded RSS feed from within flash / actionscript. Not sure why I cannot find any hint for a solution on the net? Do I just miss the point, making a stupid beginner's mistake?

Still hoping for someone dropping by and giving his technical advice .... But we are discussing in the Widget section of the forum, so asking for a technical advice is slightly off topic. Maybe I'll open up a new thread on ISO-8859 parsing issues in the Flash / Widget Development section in a few days, if we cannot find a solution in here.

According the source code, FlashLite 3.0.4 ignores the "encoding" attribute of the XML header.

My understanding after doing a few Google searches on the topic is that this is an inherent issue with Flash in general - that it requires that the contents of XML be encoding either in some variant of Unicode, or in the codepage of the system, and only if system.useCodePage=true.  In Flash MX 2004 and later, including Flash 9, it appears that *all* text must be Unicode.

See this article.

@gingerbeardman: works perfect with yahoo pipes, thanks for the hint!