From: Craig Moran <craig.m.moran.ruby@...>
Date: 2004-12-16T00:34:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Regex extraction

> > The other thing I don't know how to do is replace things like &amp; with
> &.  Is
> > there anything in the ruby standard library, maybe in rexml, that
> automatically
> > takes care of all those standard entities for me?  I looked, but I
> couldn't find
> > one.

On replacing &amp; -- This code will replace a few other items that
begin with & (ampersand) and end with ; (semicolon) including what you
wish to accomplish.

text.gsub!(/&.*?;/m) { |i|
  case i
  when "&amp;"
    "&"
  when "&nbsp;"
    ""
  when "&copy;"
    ""
  when "&#174;"
    ""
  when "&#147;"
    "`"
  when "&#148;"
    "'"
  when "&#183;"
    "-"
  when "&middot;"
    "-"
  when "&#8212;"
    "--"
  else
    ""
  end # case
}