How can I replace all the HTML-encoded accents in Perl?

Answer 1

You can try something like HTML::Entities. From the POD:

use HTML::Entities;
$a = "Våre norske tegn bør &#230res";
decode_entities($a);
#encode_entities($a, "\200-\377");  ## not needed for what you are doing

In response to your edit, HTML::Entities is not in the perl core. It might still be installed on your system because it is used by a lot of other libraries. You can check by running this command:

perl -MHTML::Entities -le 'print "If this prints, the it is installed"'

Answer 2

I don't suppose it's possible to make TeamSite leave it as utf-8/convert it to utf-8?

CGI.pm has an (undocumented) unescapeHTML function. However, since it IS undocumented (and I haven't looked through the source), I don't know if it just handles basic HTML entities (<, >, &) or more. However, I'd GUESS that it only does the basic entities.

Answer 3

For your purpose is HTML::Entities far best solution but if you will not found some existing package fits your needs following approach is more effective than multiple s/// statements

# this part do in inter function module code which is executed in compile time
# or place in BEGIN or do once before first s/// statement using it
my %trans = (
  'Aacute;' => 'Á',
  'aacute;' => 'á',
  'Agrave;' => 'À',
  'Acirc;' => 'Â',
  'agrave;' => 'à',
); # remember you can generate parts of this hash for example by map

my $re = qr/${ \(join'|', map quotemeta, keys %trans)}/;

# this code place in your functions or methods
s/($re)/$trans{$1}/g; # 'o' is almost useless here because $re has been compiled yet

Edit: There is no need of e regexp modifier as mentioned by Chas. Owens.

Answer 4

Why should someone be fired for putting XSL, which is XML, into an XML file?