Question

I’m using Ruby (and Nokogiri in case that is helpful) to encode some documents. I want to change actual unicode characters (like “) to html entities (like “). How do I do this? I know I can do a single character with something like

s = '“'    
puts "&##{.unpack('U').first};"   # gives “

but is there a way to do this properly using iconv or nokogiri?

Answer 1

I’ve come up with this method, which takes a quite brute-force approach which is surely (hopefully?) replaced by a compiled library solution? It works though:

def clean(text)
  # Convert html chars to entities.
  text = text.gsub(/[^\u{20}-\u{7E}]/){|char| "&##{char.unpack('U')[0]};"}
end