From: "Thomas Strömberg" <thomasNOMORESPAM@...>
Date: 2004-06-01T03:03:53+09:00
Subject: Problems making UTF-8 text XML/XHTML friendly (no entity conversion?)

I'm downloading information from a website in UTF-8, but I want to 
place the text I recieve into XML and XHTML output files.  In a 
nutshell, if I run into a u with an umlaut on top, like: �. I would 
like ruby to replace it with &uuml; or &#252; or &#xFC;

I made some headway trying to use unpack("U") when I ran into high 
ascii characters, but it did not seem to handle my test case very well. 
REXML's normalize function did not help either. Here is the test-case I 
am trying to handle, from http://toadstool.se/temp/utf (you may want to 
fetch the file instead of relying on what's pasted below)

Es befinden sich 3 Streichholzschachteln im Cache, diese k�nnen gegen 
Z�ndh�lzer aus aller Welt getauscht werden.

Does anyone here have any recipes for replacing all UTF characters with 
entities? If so, I would really appreciate the help. Thanks!

/ Thomas