alrighty, sorted! it's all in the encoding.
It came down to the htmlspecialchars() call being similar to
htmlentities() and displaying the code for the character instead of the character itself.
to overcome this it now reads:
Text Formatted Code
function _formatContent ($text)
{
$storytext = trim ($text);
if ($this->_feedcontentlen > 1) {
if (strlen ($storytext) > $this->_feedcontentlen) {
$storytext = substr ($storytext, 0, $this->_feedcontentlen - 3)
. '...';
}
}
return
($storytext);
}
and additionally i removed the .htmlspecialchars call between the tag in the rss.feed.class.php (rss1.0 i did it with, haven't done 2.0 yet, should be exact same).
This then opens a security flaw in a way, but if you have HTML tags allowed and disallowed for whichever tags you want allowed etc, they are still stripped before writing the RSS feed.