Question

Here’s a quick Perl question:

How can I convert HTML special characters like ü or ' to normal ASCII text?

I started with something like this:

s/\&#(\d+);/chr($1)/eg; 

and could write it for all HTML characters, but some function like this probably already exists?

Note that I don’t need a full HTML->Text converter. I already parse the HTML with the HTML::Parser. I just need to convert the text with the special chars I’m getting.

Answer 1

Take a look at HTML::Entities:

use HTML::Entities;  my $html = 'Snoopy & Charlie Brown';  print decode_entities($html), '\n'; 

You can guess the output.