The feed aggregator uses a feed URL successfully, but when I try to change settings, it rejects the feed URL with the following error message:

The URL http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=elephants+african|Kenya|Tanzania|Uganda+-zoo&output=rss is invalid. Please enter a fully-qualified URL, such as http://www.example.com/feed.xml.

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lyricnz’s picture

lyricnz commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

According to http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt (the specification for URLs) '|' is not a valid character in the query (post '?') part of the URL.

   query         = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )
   pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"

   unreserved    = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"
   pct-encoded   = "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG
   sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
                 / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="
lyricnz’s picture

lyricnz commented

You need to encode those values, something like

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=elephants+african%7CKenya%7CTanzania...

Did Google actually emit HTML with the URL you pasted? If I search news.google.com for "elephants african|Kenya|Tanzania|Uganda -zoo" then copy the link labelled RSS (down the bottom), it points to

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=au&hl=en&q=elephants+african...