From: Gonzalo Rubio <gonchuki@...>
Date: 2006-02-01T04:18:22+09:00
Subject: XML, WebService and Character Encoding issue

I created a Ruby proxy for a FoxPro app that needs to fetch data from a 
WebService (which returns it in XML) and read it in CSV format (for 
which i use REXML parser and output the CSV by hand)
To do this the WebService returns me a Base64 encoded XML that i then 
decode and process.

Everything works ok until you have non-standard characters in the XML 
data (non 7-bit characters, i.e. Western European accented characters) 
since the REXML parser dies complaining about a closing tag not found.
I looked for an entities processor or a character encoding converter in 
the standard library and i coudn't find it.

I ended doing an ugly hack by feeding a Hash with the accented character 
as the key, and the entity as the value, and then replacing back and 
forth the returned data.
my function looks like this:

def iso2entities(str, inverse)
  rep = Hash.new
  rep['叩'] = '&aacute;'
  # ... snipped code ...
  rep['息'] = '&copy;'

  unless inverse
    rep.each{|code, entity| str.gsub!(code, entity) }
  else
    rep.each{|code, entity| str.gsub!(entity, code) }
  end
  return str
end

It works, but feeding the Hash by hand is time consuming and code 
obviously looks like an ugly work-around... is there a "ruby standard" 
way to do it?

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.