Bug Report: ü entity causes XML parsing error in Rank Math sitemap styleshe

#1020625
  • Resolved Joel Lepp

    5 months, 1 week ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello Rank Math Team,

    I have encountered a small but important issue with the Rank Math sitemap’s XSL file generation.

    When accessing my sitemap at:

    https://pulmad.sydamegalooming.ee/sitemap_index.xml
    the sitemap itself (the XML) is valid and correctly structured.

    However, the associated XSL file:

    https://pulmad.sydamegalooming.ee/main-sitemap.xsl
    throws an XML parsing error in the browser:

    error on line 14 at column 41: Entity ‘uuml’ not defined
    also on line 17
    Upon investigation, the issue is that the XSL contains a ü entity (HTML entity for “ü”), but XML only allows a few predefined entities (&, <, >, &apos;, and ").
    As a result, browsers cannot properly load the XSL, causing a broken visual sitemap display.

    Important Notes:

    This does not affect search engine crawling since Google and other bots parse only the raw XML.

    However, it leads to a bad UX for users who open the sitemap manually in their browser.

    The fix would be to replace ü with either the actual Unicode character ü or its numeric entity ü.

    Could you please take this into account for the next update?
    It would make the sitemap visually load correctly in browsers without errors.

    Thank you for the great work with Rank Math!
    Best regards,
    Joel Lepp
    Südamega Looming

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Jeremy

    5 months ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

    The issue is that the umault character hasn’t escaped properly on the frontend, causing our sitemap to break. Simply remove the ü character, save the settings, and put it back. The sitemap should work.

    If it doesn’t, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

    Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

    Sensitive Data Section

    It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

    You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

    We really look forward to helping you.

    Joel Lepp

    5 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello,

    Thank you for your response. I understand your suggestion, but I would like to respectfully point out that the proposed solution is not practical in my case.

    My website contains over 100 pages and products that use Estonian language content, where characters like ü, õ, ä, ö are common and essential. It would not be feasible — or linguistically correct — to remove or replace all such letters just to avoid a frontend sitemap error.

    I believe the root cause lies in the plugin itself, specifically in how non-ASCII characters are handled in the XSL output.

    To test this, I edited the plugin file:
    seo-by-rank-math/includes/modules/sitemaps/sitemap-xsl.php
    and modified lines 178–179 as follows, to include proper Estonian characters in the upper/lowercase alphabet used:

    <xsl:variable name=”lower” select=”‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwõäöüxyz'” />
    <xsl:variable name=”upper” select=”‘ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWÕÄÖÜXYZ'” />
    After this change, the sitemap started displaying correctly in the browser without XML parsing errors.

    I kindly request that you consider including this improvement in a future plugin update, so that multilingual websites (especially in Estonian, Finnish, German etc.) won’t lose this functionality after updates.

    Thanks again for your work on Rank Math — and I hope this feedback helps make the plugin even better!

    Best regards,
    Joel Lepp
    https://pulmad.sydamegalooming.ee

    Rakibuzzaman Siam

    4 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hello,

    We deeply apologize for the unexpected delay in response.

    We really appreciate your input. We already shared this with our developers.

    However, we can see your sitemap is now working properly without any issues. Can you please confirm if you need our assistance with this issue or anything else?

    Looking forward to helping you.

    Thank you.

    Joel Lepp

    4 months, 2 weeks ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello.

    Yes its working for now, because i did changes to rankmath file. I just fear that if in some time you make update to that file and wont consider my changes it wil break again.

    Joel

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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