Question

I am reading a text file and putting its content within a tag in an xml output file. The problem I am facing is that the input text file contains some control characters like <96> or <92> which cause my script to output invalid xml.

How can I convert these control characters to corresponding numerical HTML entities so that there is no data loss and the resulting file is valid as well?

I have tried:

perl -p -i -e 's/\x96/\&\#150\;/g; s/\x92/\&\#146\;/g;' out_xml

But I would like to convert any control characters to HTML entities.

Answer 1

HTML::Entities does what you want:

$ perl -MHTML::Entities -le 'print encode_entities("\x96\x92")'
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