From: Patrick May <patrick@...>
Date: 2004-10-16T15:15:41+09:00
Subject: Re: turning a non-ASCII character into a XML entity with REXML?

On Friday, October 15, 2004, at 08:38  PM, Francis Hwang wrote:

> 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.

I think there's an escapeHTML function on the CGI that might do it.  Of 
course, it will also hit the &gt; and &lt;.  You could still lift the 
code from there.

~ pat