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 ...