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RSS to Facebook and Instagram - text split across multiple lines (paragraph breaks)

  • 31 January 2022
  • 3 replies
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I have created a Zap that triggers from a new item in a RSS feed (from a Squarespace blog post) and posts to a Facebook page. The action posts the “description” in the message, but when the post comes through in Facebook it breaks the text into multiple lines. For example:

 

Description from RSS Feed:

From Feb. 7th- Mar 14th we will be in a special season of focused, sacrificial giving for the sake of the gospel, in City and to the ends of the earth!

 

How it posts in Facebook:

From Feb. 7th- Mar 14th we will be in a special season of focused,

sacrificial giving for the sake of the gospel, in City and to the ends of

the earth!

 

I have tested this on multiple posts and face the same issue. After comparing how it broke up text on three different posts, it seems that it breaks the lines at 75 characters (or shorter if the next word will not fit within 75).  I also face this exact same issue with a zap that posts the same RSS to Instagram for Business.

I have yet another zap that posts the RSS to Twitter and faced the same issue, but changed the trigger to use “raw description” which seemed to fix it, but that didn’t work for FB or Instagram. In fact, since Twitter was working correctly, I tried to zap from Twitter to Facebook and still had the same issue, so it seems to be related to how the zap posts in FB (given the issue is seen from both RSS and Twitter).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Best answer by SamB 2 February 2022, 11:59

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Welcome to the Community, @Jon Kempf!

Hmm, it’s very odd that the text is being spit across multiple lines like that. I’m wondering if there’s actually some hidden line breaks present in the text we’re receiving from the RSS feed. If so, it could be that Twitter is ignoring these line breaks but Facebook and Instagram aren’t.  

To test out this theory can you please try adding a Formatter (Text > Replace) step to replace the line breaks ([:newline:]) in the Raw Description field with spaces ([:space:]) instead. For example: 
5678e887c57a1667d51c674738178779.png
Then use the text that’s output from that Formatter step in your Facebook/Instagram steps.

If it posts the text correctly, then we’ll then know for certain that the issue is caused by formatting in the RSS feed itself rather than an issue on the Facebook/Instagram side of things. In which case, you’d need to either adjust the output of the RSS feed (if you have access to the feed’s set up to do so) or keep the Formatter step in place to ensure any unnecessary line breaks are always removed. 

Please do keep us in the loop on how you get on with this! :)

@SamB - That fixed it! Except now I no longer have a single step Zap to use on a free account (but that isn’t your problem :relaxed: )...thanks for the help!

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Yay! That’s great news @Jon Kempf! I’m so glad that did the trick. :)