Question

I have a string where special characters like ! or " or & or # or @, … can appear. How can I convert in the string

str = " Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so *n @."

automatically every special characters with their html entities, so that I get this:

str = " Hello &quot ;XYZ&quot ; this &#39 ;is&#39 ; a test &amp ; so on @" 

I tried

$str=HTML::Entities::encode_entities($str);

but it does a partial work the @ is not transformed in &#64 ;

SOLUTION:

1) with your help (Quentin and vol7ron) I came up with this solution(1)

$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'@'} = '@';
$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'!'} = '!';
$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'#'} = '#';
$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'%'} = '%';
$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'.'} = '.';
$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'*'} = '*';
$str=HTML::Entities::encode_entities($str, q{@"%'.&#*$^!});

2) and I found a shorter(better) solution(2) found it here:

$str=HTML::Entities::encode_entities($str, '\W');

the ‘\W’ does the job

@von7ron with solution(1) you will need to specify the characters you want to translate as Quentin mentioned earlier even if they are on the translation table.

Answer 1

You can manually add a character to the translation table (char2entity hash).

$HTML::Entities::char2entity{'@'} = '@';

my $str      =  q{ Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so on @};
my $encoded  =  HTML::Entities::encode_entities( $str, q{<>&"'@} );

1. The above adds @, which will be translated to @.
2. You then need to specify the characters you want to translate, if you don’t it uses <>&", so I added both @ and '. Notice, I didn’t have to add the ' to the translation table, because it’s already there by default.
3. You don’t need to add ASCII characters (0-255) to the char2entity hash, since the module will do it automatically.

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Note: Setting the char2entity for @, was done as an example. The module automatically sets numerical entities for ASCII characters (0-255) that weren’t found. You’d have to use it for unicode characters, though.