Question

I am using the SimpleRSS gem to parse a WordPress RSS feed. The only problem is that many characters in that feed are encoded using numeric codes, e.g.

’ 

instead of

'

Files

*rss_helper.rb*

module RssHelper
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'simple-rss'
  require 'open-uri'

  def rss
    rss = SimpleRSS.parse open('http://example.com/feed/')
  end
end

show.html.slim

...
-rss.entries.each do |entry|
  =entry.title

With the entry.title, I have tried:

=entry.title.encode("UTF-8")

=entry.title.encode(Encoding::UTF_8, :invalid => :replace, :undef => :replace, :replace => '')

Neither has worked. I found a lot of resources regarding the iconv gem, but from what I understand it is deprecated now.

I also attempted using the .force_encoding method instead of .encoding, but no matter what I choose it always displays that numeric code directly from the feed.

How do I force it to render the proper character?

EDIT: Here is my final helper using the gem suggested by the selected answer, included here so anyone who views this can see what I did.

*rss_helper.rb*

def decode(string) 
  coder = HTMLEntities.new 
  return coder.decode(string) 
end 

show.html.slim

...
decode(entry.title)
...

Answer 1

Run it through HTMLEntities.

HTMLEntities.new.decode(rss_feed_content)

This’ll translate the entity-encoded characters into their literal equivalents.