From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-10-16T09:38:31+09:00
Subject: turning a non-ASCII character into a XML entity with REXML?

I asked this a little while back but maybe didn't ask the right way, so 
maybe somebody can help me if I rephrase:

I'm trying to build an RSS feed that takes, in its item descriptions, 
ISO-8859-1 text. (I'm using REXML for now.) I'd like to be able to take 
a non-ASCII character and turn it into a usable XML entity. So, for 
example, "\251" would get turned into "&#169":

str = "\251 2004 Francis Hwang"
elt = REXML::Element.new( 'elt' )
elt.text = str
elt.to_s
=> "<elt>\251 2004 Francis Hwang</elt>"
# But I want "<elt>&#169; 2004 Francis Hwang</elt>"

Is there some sort of setting I can twiddle in REXML so that I can 
assign a text that includes these sorts of characters, and REXML will 
know to turn them into entities on output? I know I can do this by hand 
and then prevent escaping by use the :raw flag, but I'd like to avoid 
that if possible.

Francis