Syntax Error at Line 1, Column 61?

June 24, 2007 4:41 PM

Mystery error ... possibly with MagpieRSS in WordPress' rss.php, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

In the "error_log" file, I see a constant recurring error "Syntax error at line 1, column 61". I've Googled the hell out of it, and it seems to be related to MagpieRSS, which I believe is integrated into WordPress as rss.php. However, I can't figure out what's causing it, despite a good 90-120 minutes of detective work. Even the timing seems erratic: they'll happen in clumps 1 or 14 days apart, and in the clumps, each individual error might happen eight or 60 minutes apart. It doesn't seem to happen more than two or three times at a "clump."

Google turns up a LOT of noise in the results, as Googlebot indexes the error when it occurs on people's blogs. I've seen it reference a "rss-fetch.inc" in some blogs, but I can't find a counterpart in WordPress.

Anyway ... would appreciate people's genius on this one.

posted by WCityMike to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I should also report that one might think, "Cron job." But I checked my web account's cron jobs using my host's cPanel cron checker, and I didn't see any jobs. I see that WordPress integrated some sort of "pseudcron" in a recent version, but I'm unsure how to check those jobs.
posted by WCityMike at 4:45 PM on June 24, 2007

Which RSS files are you parsing? It may be that Magpie is having connection issues with the RSS files or the RSS files occasionally are improperly encoded. Can you point wordpress at an invalid rss file (ie, any file that's not an rss file) and see what happens when you run it? That may let you narrow down the issue.
posted by null terminated at 4:53 PM on June 24, 2007

null terminated: Unfortunately, I have no idea what RSS feed it is parsing. As far as I can tell, there are three possibilities:

(1) My blog's feed itself. I'm not sure if this is it because I disabled FeedBurner and looked at the actual RSS feed, and didn't see anything unusual.

(2) The Netflix "What's At Home" RSS feed that my site's Netflix plugin goes off of. Not likely because the error predates that plugin's installation. Also, there's no column 61 in that feed's RSS feed.

(3) My Metafilter posts RSS feed and WP-O-Matic, which posts to my blog anything I post to Metafilter. Also not likely because, again, the error very, very, very much predates that plugin's installation.
posted by WCityMike at 5:03 PM on June 24, 2007

Hmm...I wonder if it's coming from the RSS feeds that show up when you log into the wordpress admin page.

I'd check wp-includes/rss-functions.php. Line 73 has:

$this->error( $errormsg );


Changing this to something like:

$this->error('!!THE ERROR IS HERE!!'. $errormsg );


would verify that this is the code causing the problem if '!!THE ERROR IS HERE!!' showed up in your log file.
posted by null terminated at 5:28 PM on June 24, 2007

You may be using an old version, null -- rss-functions in mine simply says:

// Deprecated. Use rss.php instead.
require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');

Any idea what in rss.php I'd flag?
posted by WCityMike at 5:51 AM on June 25, 2007

By the way — there's some serious exploits that came out ... if you're anywhere in the 2.x stack and not at the latest version, definitely upgrade ...
posted by WCityMike at 5:52 AM on June 25, 2007