From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-09-06T00:20:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Encoding hell

On Sep 5, 2005, at 8:34 AM, Damphyr wrote:

> 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:

This is definitely a hack, but it's working for the data you showed:

require "rexml/document"

def unescape( xml )
     xml.gsub!("&lt;", "<")
     xml.gsub!("&gt;", ">")
     xml.gsub!("&amp;", "&")
     xml
end

doc  = REXML::Document.new(unescape(DATA.read))
doc.each_element("string/ISBNORG/RECORD/*") { |e| p e }

__END__
<?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>

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II