Decoding HTML entities in Emacs/Elisp

Question

Some online websites like to encode all their text through HTML entities, so instead of seeing a text like

So I'm looking

You get something like:

So I'm looking 

I was wondering if there's a built in way to translate the encoded text to regular text using any Emacs built-ins or if I should declare my map of strings ("&83" => "S"...) and manually decode it using a map.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Don't know if there is a built in function, but this small function can do the job:

(defun my-insert-encode-entities-string (str)
  (mapconcat
   (lambda (char) (format "&#%d;" char))
   (string-to-list str)
   ""))

If you only wish to encode HTML entities, use url-insert-entities-in-string instead.