How to remove special characters? (ie. &)

rubyonrails-talk
1

This might be such a stupid simple question, so forgive me--I did search the forum and elsewhere and couldn't find the answer...

I have an HTML text string that formats nicely on a web page:

s = "Mom & Dad" => "Mom & Dad"

How do I convert s to just ascii characters, ie. "Mom & Dad"?

2

Yachtman,

Check out http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9/classes/CGI.html#M000527 (It worked with 2.2 also)

ugly = CGI::escapeHTML('<BR><A HREF="url"></A>')

=> "&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A HREF=&quot;url&quot;&gt;&lt;/A&gt;"

print CGI::unescapeElement(ugly, "A", "IMG")

&lt;BR&gt;<A HREF="url"></A>=> nil

print CGI::unescapeElement(ugly, "A", "IMG", "BR")

<BR><A HREF="url"></A>=> nil

There might be a higher level function too, but this shows you how you might use this directly

Al

3

yachtman wrote:

This might be such a stupid simple question, so forgive me--I did search the forum and elsewhere and couldn't find the answer...

I have an HTML text string that formats nicely on a web page:

s = "Mom &amp; Dad" => "Mom & Dad"

How do I convert s to just ascii characters, ie. "Mom & Dad"?

I haven't tried this, but it looks like a robust solution that might work for you: http://htmlentities.rubyforge.org/

4

Of course, you can’t use this to handle all possible encoded strings