I am trying to decode some HTML entities, such as '&lt;' becoming '<'.
I have an old gem (html_helpers) but it seems to have been abandoned twice.
Any recommendations? I will need to use it in a model.
<% str="<h1> Test </h1>" %>
result: < h1 > Test < /h1 >
<%= CGI.unescapeHTML(str).html_safe %>
You can use htmlascii gem:
Htmlascii.convert string
To decode characters in Rails use:
<%= raw '<html>' %>
So,
<%= raw '<br>' %>
would output
<br>
To encode the characters, you can use CGI.escapeHTML:
string = CGI.escapeHTML('test "escaping" <characters>')
To decode them, there is CGI.unescapeHTML:
CGI.unescapeHTML("test "unescaping" <characters>")
Of course, before that you need to include the CGI library:
require 'cgi'
And if you're in Rails, you don't need to use CGI to encode the string. There's the h method.
<%= h 'escaping <html>' %>
I think Nokogiri gem is also a good choice. It is very stable and has a huge contributing community.
Samples:
a = Nokogiri::HTML.parse "foo bär"
a.text
=> "foo bär"
or
a = Nokogiri::HTML.parse "¡I'm highly annoyed with character references!"
a.text
=> "¡I'm highly annoyed with character references!"
If you don't want to add a new dependency just to do this (like HTMLEntities) and you're already using Hpricot, it can both escape and unescape for you. It handles much more than CGI:
Hpricot.uxs "foo bär"
=> "foo bär"
Source: Stackoverflow.com