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**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [April 12, 2007, 2:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-entites-in-clothred-yay-or-nay/91802 "2007-04-12T14:47:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@Phillip\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Phillip_G)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2007, 2:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-entites-in-clothred-yay-or-nay/91802/1 "2007-04-12T14:47:23Z")
In preparation of release 0.3.0 (hopefully later today ;), I’m
wondering: Should I translated HTML entities into human-readable format?
My hunch is yes, as that’s the point of Textile.
So, I’m at a bit of a loss: I’ve never, ever worked with character
encodings (I don’t even know how to check the encoding on Linux or
Windows).
So, my question is, how do I replace the HTML entities with ISO-8859-1
characters?
The trouble is, that the character encodings don’t seem to be taken off
of UTF-8 or something else that I can just escape, or can I?
Meanwhile, I’m digging through the RDoc documentation. Hopefully, I can
find something there.
–
Phillip “CynicalRyan” Gawlowski
[http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/](http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/)
[http://clothred.rubyforge.org](http://clothred.rubyforge.org)
Rule of Open-Source Programming #13:
Your first release can always be improved upon.
---
**Author:**  [@Phillip\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Phillip_G)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2007, 3:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-entites-in-clothred-yay-or-nay/91802/2 "2007-04-12T15:10:27Z")
It seems like you need HTMLEntities
([http://htmlentities.rubyforge.org/](http://htmlentities.rubyforge.org/)) which will add a dependency on
your distribution (but better than repeating the same effort others
did).
I think that dependency may be made optional and ClothRed could throw
an exception when asked to decode HTML entities and could not find
that module. I don’t know if this is acceptable to you.
From the docs, code like
```
require 'htmlentities'
coder = HTMLEntities.new
string = "élan"
coder.decode(string) # => "élan"
```
take your HTML with entities into UTF-8 characters if I understood
correctly.
Cheers,
Adriano F…
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**Author:**  [@Phillip\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Phillip_G)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2007, 3:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-entites-in-clothred-yay-or-nay/91802/3 "2007-04-12T15:11:27Z")
All HTML can be coded in ASCII, as can XML and XHTML
However, that is simply the markup itself.
Do not forgo the encoding.
Convert everything to UTF-8
There is no reason to use anything else.
Visit:
[http://www.unicode.org/charts/](http://www.unicode.org/charts/)
[http://www.unicode.org/](http://www.unicode.org/)