From: Zach Dennis <zdennis@...>
Date: 2005-09-06T00:25:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Encoding hell

On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 22:34 +0900, 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:
> 
> <?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 :)

You are seeing already escaped characters. You need to unescape them. 

str = CGI.unescapeHTML( string )
REXML::Document.new( str )

HTH,

Zach