Question

Let’s say we have a html string like “2 < 4″

How should be determined if it contains any of these extended sequences?

I ‘ve found HTML::Entities on CPAN, but it doesn’t provide ‘check’ method.

Details: fixing ‘truncate’ method in a way to not leave corrupted string like “2 &l” and not to do unnecesary work. It should look like this

$s = HTML::Entities::decode_entities ($s) if $has_ext_chars;
$s = substr ($s, 0, $len - 3) . '...' if length $s > $len;
$s = HTML::Entities::encode_entities ($s, "‚„-‰‹‘-™›\xA0¤¦§©«-®°-±µ-·»") if $has_ext_chars;

How do I determine $has_ext_chars?

Answer 1

A complete list of character entities can be found on the W3C reference.

You have also to match \&#u?\d+; and \&#x[a-fA-F0-9]+;