Rank Math SEO PRO - Incorrect Language Codes in News Sitemap

Overview of the issue

If you are using the Rank Math SEO plugin, specifically the Pro version with the News Sitemap feature enabled, you may encounter an issue where <news:language> tags within the news-sitemap.xml file incorrectly display the language code of the site’s default language for posts in secondary languages..

Workaround

Please, make sure of having a full site backup of your site before proceeding.

• Open …/wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math-pro/includes/modules/news-sitemap/class-news-sitemap.php file.
• Replace:

  		$output .= $this->get_news_publication( $renderer );
  

• With:

  		//start WPML workaround
  		global $sitepress;
  		remove_filter(
  			'get_pages',
  			[ $sitepress, 'get_pages_adjust_ids' ],
  			1
  		);
  		$my_post_language_details = apply_filters( 'wpml_post_language_details', NULL, url_to_postid($url["loc"]) );
  		$xmlString = $this->get_news_publication( $renderer );
  		$pattern = '/(<news:language>)[^<>]*(</news:language>)/i';
  		$replacement = '${1}'. $my_post_language_details["language_code"] .'$2';
  		$modifiedXmlString = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $xmlString);
  		$output .= $modifiedXmlString;
  		//end WPML workaround
  

• In addition, you may also need to disable sitemap caching. To do this, you can add the following line to the functions.php file of your theme:

  add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');