From: Damphyr <damphyr@...>
Date: 2005-09-05T22:34:08+09:00
Subject: Encoding hell

OK, I am officially frustrated/lost/bewildered (take your pick) with all 
this encoding/decoding of character sets.
I'm trying to grab some book data from a web service using ISBN numbers. 
I'm using a simple GET HTTP request and on a query the service returns 
the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<string xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET">
&lt;ISBNORG&gt;
&lt;RECORD&gt;
&lt;ISBN&gt;0764558315&lt;/ISBN&gt;
&lt;AUTHOR&gt;Rod Johnson, with Juergen Hoeller.&lt;/AUTHOR&gt;
&lt;FULLTITLE&gt;Expert one-on-one J2EE development without EJB / Rod 
Johnson, with Juergen Hoeller.&lt;/FULLTITLE&gt;

&lt;SHORTTITLE&gt;Expert one-on-one J2EE development without EJB 
/&lt;/SHORTTITLE&gt;
&lt;EDITION&gt;&lt;/EDITION&gt;
&lt;PUBLISHER&gt;Wiley Pub./Wrox,&lt;/PUBLISHER&gt;
&lt;DATE&gt;c2004.&lt;/DATE&gt;
&lt;SUBJECT&gt;Java (Computer program language)&lt;/SUBJECT&gt;

&lt;/RECORD&gt;
&lt;/ISBNORG&gt;
</string>

which I can't parse with REXML :(. If all the &lt; &gt; where < and > 
then no prob, everything checks out fine. Same code with the above 
snippet refuses to extract the data. Obviously I'm missing something.
Is there a way to parse this string so that all the escaped stuff goes 
back to normal? Can REXML understand the ampersand thingies?
Any help will be appreciated,
Cheers,
V.-
P.S. I'd have used Pickaxe 2.ed for the example if only the book was in 
their database :)

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